Harris Tweed Tartans

[M. A. C. Newsome]

Nick,

There are different principles in play here, I believe.

On the one hand, yes, historically and traditionally variation in tartan was the norm. There was no real attempt to standardize tartan until the eighteenth century with large firms such as Wilsons of Bannockburn, and much of the need for standardization was due to tartan being adopted by the military.

Industrial production methods made such standarization more easily achieved. When tartan was, for the most part, woven by hand in small runs, variation was indeed the norm. Also this would be in the day before named clan tartans, so really who cared much if a stripe was missing here or there? People bought and wore tartan becuase they liked the design of it, not because the particular design meant anything to them.

On the other hand, today is a different situation. Named tartans are the norm -- in fact to many if it is not a named tartan, it's not really a tartan! People wear tartans for symbolic reasons, and the specific design of that tartan is very important to them.

This is especially true when you have many tartans that are extremely close in design. Weave the MacLaren tartan with white in place of yellow and what you have is not "the MacLaren tartan with white" but rather the Ferguson tartan! Leave one of the narrow green stripes off the MacQuarrie tartan and you have the MacDonald of Sleat. Flip-flop the red and white in the MacKenzie tartan and you have Hunting Robertson.

Then, as you said, there is the fact that the customer deserves to get what they ordered. If I ordered a length of Gunn tartan and received what you show in the pictures, I'd send it back. Not because it is not lovely but because it is not the recognized Gunn tartan.

For what it's worth, a lot of tartans I have seen offered in Harris Tweed have not been accurate. I've had to use a discerning eye when ordering Harris Tweed in tartan in the past. Most of the time the tartans have been reproduced accurately but often enough the weaver has taken some liberties with the design. I once purchased a length of Harris Tweed that was being sold as MacKenzie -- and the small image I saw of it on line indeeded looked like it could be a weathered MacKenzie. When I received the length of tartan cloth, I discovered that the pattern was similar to the MacKenzie but with a few differences. One of which was that the tartan had an entirely different warp and weft!

I kept the cloth because I was buying it primarily for the aesthetics. And I sold the kilt I made in that cloth as a "non-named tartan similat to weathered MacKenzie." But if I were buying the cloth specifically because I wanted/needed the MacKenzie tartan I would have quickly sent it back to the weaver.

Variation and creativity are one of the things you will expect in hand-woven goods produced in small batches -- it is one of the things that makes Harris Tweed so lovely, in my opinion. But when you add tartan to the equation, you do have to be carefull that creativity does not compromise the design of the tartan itself -- customers want their own tartan, after all, not a fashion variation of it!