The history of Tartan

Let's learn about Tartan!

 Tartan is a woven material usually in wool and the Scottish pattern used for the kilt.  It's a pattern consisting of criss-crossed horizontal and vertical bands in multiple colours. It's one of the most important symbols of Scotland.  Tartan is often called plaid in North America, but in Scotland, a plaid is a tartan cloth slung over the shoulder as a kilt accessory, or a plain ordinary blanket such as one would have on a bed.
Nowadays Tartan is worn by a lot of people, but before to come in our dressing room, Tartan had a story!

Concerning the etymological history of tartan, the DSL, Dictionary of the Scots Language, derives the term from old French “tiretaine”, ‘a sort of cloth half wool, half some other yarn; stuff of which the weft is wool and the warp linen or cotton’. This form of cloth is now called linsey-woolsey. The French word “tiretaine” was used in the Breton for cider made half of apples and half of pears. 

Nowadays if you search the definition of Tartan on the DSL website you will read a woollen cloth woven in stripes of varying width and colour repeated at regular intervals and crossing a similar set of stripes at right angles so as to form a pattern.

There is a debate among people who see tartan as the visual symbol of an ancient Scottish clan system and people who regard its role in that same system as primarily a nineteenth-century socio-political invention. Other studies suggested parallels between tartan patterns and other cultures’ weaving traditions.

Tartan was used as a  Clan or Family form of identification. One of the first recorded mentions of Tartan was is 1538 when King James V purchases "three ells of Heland Tartans" for his wife to wear. It is now generally accepted that clan tartans were established and named towards the end of the 18th century. 

Complete story on the link below!

Read more: http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/The-History-of-Tartan/