by KASSIA ST CLAIR
The Line of Beauty: a cloth of many moods, as well as colours, tartan is back in fashion.
Tartan, and anything else thought to inspire anti-Crown fervour in Jacobite Highlanders, was banned by the Parliament in 1746. But Colonel—later General—Gordon of Fyvie wasn’t the kind of man to pay heed to a Sassenach government. Hand on hip, sword drawn, draped in plaid – a deliberate echo of the statue of Roma he’s leaning on—his stance proclaims that Scotland will be here when all other civilisations have crumbled. Was he right? A quarter of a millennium later Britain is still clinging on to Scotland—just. And tartan is going strong.
By the 1780s the threat of a Scottish rebellion had waned and nobility on both sides of the border, feeding on notions of Highland romance, fell in love with tartan. Victoria and Albert took to the craze with gusto. After building Balmoral Castle in 1853 they decorated it, from carpet to curtain rails, in ebulliently clashing tartans, including a couple of their own design (Balmoral lavender, anyone?). These girls may look like extras in a Bela Lugosi film but are in fact two of the royal offspring. If the photo had been taken inside, they would have been indistinguishable from the sofas.
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