Tartan, from the kilt to the catwalk

Hi everyone!

It's already the end of the semester at UWS and also the end of my Erasmus year in Scotland. That's why this is my last article. 

It was a really great experience for me to write my own blog! I would like to thank everyone who reads me and those who have kept faithful to me since the creation of the blog. Thank you very much! 

So, for this last post, I am going to explain how Tartan came in fashion. Nowadays fashion designers use the pattern increasingly in their fashion collection. And this year as I showed you in my previous article, we saw a lot of tartan during the Fashion Week 2016.

Tartan appeared in the runways during the nineteen nineties with two major fashion designers, Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood. 

Alexander McQueen was the first to use his talent to make fashionable tartan and history. His use of this tartan is significant because of the many cultural and historical associations the textile carries. For McQueen, tartan was a reference to his own Scottish heritage as well as to Scotland's turbulent political history.

Suit, Highland Rape, autumn/winter 1995–96 (jacket and skirt not worn together on the runway)

If you would like to learn more about this famous fashion designer, this is a great report about him. 

Vivienne Westwood has a fascination with Scottish traditions. In 1993 she created a collection "Anglomania". Have a look on this blog concerning the tartan clan on the Vivienne Westwood website.

Westwood and McQueen have deliberately subverted the traditional and historical associations of the fabric. 

Few years after, other designers started to use tartan like Comme des Garçons in 2000, Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton in 2004 and Balenciaga for the fall show in 2006. 

Then thanks to the Fashion Weeks and those designers, famous people started to wear Tartan like Sarah Jessica Parker in 2006. For the Metropolitan's gala benefit dinner to celebrate the opening of the 2006 exhibition AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion, McQueen and the actress Sarah Jessica Parker arrived together in matching tartan finery. 

In the end of this article I would like to talk about my talented friend Alizée Loubet who is studying fashion design at La Cambre, one of Belgium's leading schools of art and design. I’m very proud of her and during this year she created a beautiful bust of tartan. I wish one day, we will see her collections on the catwalk! 

Tartan & co

Movies & Tartan

Hi!

Tonight I suggest to watch a movie:

BRAVEHEART directed by Mel Gibson.




The 1995 movie with Mel Gibson and Sophie Marceau is an awe-inspiring cinematic portrayal of Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace a 13th-century Scottish warrior and his greatest accomplishments. William Wallace is a Scottish rebel who leads an uprising against the cruel English ruler Edward the Longshanks, who wishes to inherit the crown of Scotland for himself. When he was a young boy, William Wallace's father and brother, along with many others, lost their lives trying to free Scotland.


I have watched it one month ago and it's a really nice film. But be careful the film is a “historical fantasy” and shouldn’t be taken as the accurate portrayal of Wallace’s life (but that does not devalue it). Traditionally the visual sign of clanship and district, tartan was popularized outside Scotland by the tartan-clad Highland regiments and Queen Victoria's royal endorsement. Hollywood has continued to sustain the romantic fictions of tartan like in Braveheart.

William Wallace’s origins is wrong in the movie. Wallace was portrayed as a poor man who was secretly married right before he got in trouble with the English. Actually, he was a landed commoner with a good education. Moreover the Scots didn’t paint their faces for battle, the distinctive blue face paint—called “woad”— in the movie was not real. To finish William Wallace never once in his life wore a clan tartan kilt, what we saw in Braveheart was not worn in the 13^th century.

However I definitely recommend it to you!!!


Other film's suggestion with nice tartan:

Coming to America with Eddie Murphy in his McDowell's tartan uniform!
Summury: an African prince goes to Queens, New York City to find a wife whom he can respect for her intelligence and will.

And the second movie is Kill Bill, with Chiyaki Kuriyama as Go-Go Yubari, the kilted schoolgirl assassin.

Enjoy!