Hi, I’m Ashleigh and I’m a costume designer, recovering academic and historian. For the last twenty odd years I’ve been immersed in textiles and clothes, designing costumes and working in costume shops around the country and teaching in fashion and costume programs. But now I’m writing words about the things I love most - or saying the words, if you’re listening to the podcast format. Hi. Let me tell you about some cool things.
-o-
To start with, I wanted to introduce y’all to a thing I love most: Plaid. This is going to be a series examining the history and cultural impact of plaid across the time and space. Before we get too far into all of that, though, it’s best to have us all on the same page as far as what plaid actually is.
What is Plaid?
So glad you asked. It’s the fabric with the stripes and squares going perpendicular to each other, right? Some people call it Tartan, and some people think Tartan and Plaid are not interchangeable terms, but some people think they absolutely are. It’s the famous Scottish fabric used for kilts. And what does it look like?
Kind of looks like this:
Or maybe something like this:
Or maybe it’s something like this:
Or even:
Definitions of plaid vary, but not all that much. Here’s a few for us to consider:
From The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Tartan:
“In its structure, a tartan is essentially a checked pattern.”5
From The Fashion Designer’s Textile Directory, 2nd Edition:
“Geometric images produced in multiple colors in fabric are generally called either a check or a plaid. Check fabrics are usually two colors, and plaids are three or more colors with a more intricate use of color and spacing. Both types of images were originally created using dyed yarns and weaving them into fabrics to create the check or the plaid. However the process of dyeing yarn first and then producing only woven fabric is slow and limiting. Today, checks and plaids can be produced as a printed image on any fabric, created using a cross-dyed method, or continuing the traditional yarn-dyed method.”6
Both of these definitions support the other, and both are very broad. You could argue that anything with squares is plaid, via the ‘essentially a checked pattern’ notion.
Look at all the plaid:
There isn’t even any suggestion that a plaid needs to be made of intersecting or overlapping lines. We can argue that a check and a plaid are different - a check only has two colors and a plaid has three or more - but that doesn’t really hold up. People call it Buffalo Plaid as often as they call it Buffalo Check, maybe more. And there are plenty of two color fabrics out there that people would insist are plaid and not check at all, such as:
So that really brings us to a more simple definition: lines and rectangles that form a geometric pattern. Sounds good? Excellent. Let’s use that.
Now that we’re all in agreement about what plaid is I want to ask the question: where is it from? A quick Google search, or maybe almost everything you’ve ever been told, would say ‘it’s from Scotland’ and sure, Tartan is Scottish. Plaid is for kilts and so plaid is Scottish.
Except it’s not. Or at least, it’s not just from Scotland. It’s not originally from Scotland and plaid as we know it - and define it - isn’t unique to a small northern European island. There is a persistent narrative that plaid was spread around the world, in particular in Africa, by Scottish missionaries in the 19th century. I’m going to get to why that narrative is problematic in addition to just not being true: plaid is a lot older and a lot more global.
There’s a wonderful book, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber that is worth a read (and a second and third read) but one of the things that captivated me the most is from the Introduction and when I first read this book years ago it was one of those meme-able mind altering moments for me.
Barber gets into the history of plaid right away, but she doesn’t talk about Scotland, she talks about a salt mine in Austria.
That looks… like plaid. Like contemporary or even 16th century Scottish plaid, but it’s from a salt mine in Austria and it’s about 2,600 to 2,800 years old.
Is that the oldest plaid? The short answer is no, but I’m going to make the answer longer so I can go on a bit of a tangent. Material culture is the study of stuff and how it’s, you know, influenced culture. The problem with material culture is that stuff gets destroyed or thrown away or recycled or forgotten. And that includes textiles. The sample on display at the Natural History Museum in Vienna is a good example of this: it was lost in a salt mine but even more that it was damaged. We can see evidence of repair to one portion, but there’s overall some holes and well, it is just a small scrap of fabric. What happened to the rest of it?
When we look at the history of clothing and textiles, we have to keep in mind that we just don’t have a lot of stuff to look at anymore and what we do have, we need to consider from the lens of why we still have it and whom it came from. When we look at extant clothes and textiles, at paintings and sculpture, it’s important to remember that all of that represents only a portion of reality. A lot of the extant historical clothing we have is from wealthier people, because they didn’t have to wear it until it fell apart or was re-made into clothing for someone else and passed down through families until it just became scraps for a quilt.
When we think about plaid today I don’t think too many of us associate it with wealth - Vivienne Westwood aside - and in fact it’s probably the opposite with so much mass manufactured plaid flannel everywhere. And while it might be true now that plaid isn’t necessarily representative of social status, it definitely has been at various points in history.
And, in fact, we have a very old example of that: the burial sites of the Tarim Basin mummies in central Asia, today the Xinjiang region of China. This series of burial sites reveal a Bronze Age culture that thrived on trade and among the remains is a scrap of fabric that dates back almost 3000 years ago:
And next time, we’re going to talk more about the Tarim Basin mummies and debate the origins of this little scrap of fabric.
-o-
Go ahead and subscribe so you get that sweet update notification for Part II. It’s free, but we live in a capitalist hellscape so if you want to do the paid subscription, I won’t be mad about it. But you can also subscribe for free and I definitely won’t be mad.
Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú, Lima, Peru.
Isn't Plaid to some extent the natural outcome of any weaving? Threads/yarn going across/through threads going up and down. Wouldn't you expect to find some version of plaid everywhere and as far back as you find weavers?