Tartan’s Self-(Fashion)ing: Scotland’s Story of Tragedy and Romance
The politics of tartan, history, and Alexander McQueen’s fashion
Scotland’s historical narrative is a recent construction, for “in the late 1960s and 1970s, historians of modern Scotland achieved more in two decades than their predecessors had done in centuries”(Devine, 9). An evident cause for the rise in interest of Scottish history was the turbulence of Scottish politics at the time, importantly, “the rise of the SNP from the 1960s, the devolution agenda, and the pollisters’ conclusions that in terms of identity ‘Scottishness’ seemed to be gaining on ‘Britishness’”(ibid, 10). English historians and journalists rallied against this by invalidating Scotland’s idenitiy as a nation. In 1983, Hugh Trevor-Roper claimed,
“Indeed, the whole concept of a distinct Highland culture and tradition is a retrospective invention. Before the later years of the seventeenth century, the Highlanders of Scotland did not form a distinct people. They were simply the overflow of Ireland […] So far from being a traditional Highland dress, [tartan] was invented by an Englishman after the union of 1707; and the differentiated ‘clan tartans’ are an even later invention.” (15–19)
Ironically, Trevor-Roper’s ‘evidence’ is attributed to articles and books from the mid-twentieth century, such as H. F. McClintock’s Old Highland Dress and Tartans — which merely states tartan was “a matter of private taste, or necessity, only”(23). Ian Brown reveals Trevor-Roper’s biased portrayal of ‘History’ years later in 2010, delving into the Dictionary of the Scots Language:
“By 1561, however, an entry from Dundee suggests that colour is implied by ‘tartan’, not just a form of cloth, while the matter is entirely clear in an entry from 1616–33: ‘warm stuff of divers colours which they call tartane’”. (2)
Brown also looks at Daniel Defoe’s Memoirs of the Cavalier (1720), where Defoe describes the tartan of the Highlanders in a battle of 1639 with “oddness and barbarity […] their doublet, breeches and stockings, of a stuff they call plaid, striped across red and yellow, with short cloaks of the same. These fellows looked when drawn out like a regiment of Merry Andrews ready for Bartholomew Fair”(qtd. Brown, 3). Defoe’s presentation of events is coloured with antagonism. The threat posed by the Scottish army is intentionally diluted by narrative choices of Comedy and Satire, modes of emplotment outlined by Northrop Frye in his investigation of narrative, and subsequently employed by New Historicist Hayden White in his seminal work, Tropics of Discourse (1978). White discerns History as a narrative which uses the same techniques as literature, claiming “the historian [is] above all a story teller”(83). Indeed, Defoe’s historical account is skewed to present the Scots as mere savages and merry jesters, a nation of ridicule, one which could not hold any power. Thus, our knowledge of the Highlands during this period is coloured by Defoe’s choice of emplotment, as is our view of tartan and its history by historians like Trevor-Roper. Not only this, Defoe’s narrative is a political one — his presentation of events is purposed to increase morale in England by portraying the Scots as ridiculous compared to the sophistication held by the English.
Scotland’s mounting power which is feared and tucked away in Defoe’s account was clamped down upon soon enough, what with the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Shortly after, “a period known as the Highland Clearances began. A number of laws were introduced in an attempt to assimilate the Highlanders; wearing traditional tartan attire was banned and clan chiefs had their rights to jurisdiction removed”(Scotland.org). Trevor-Roper’s decree that tartan is an Englishman’s creation during the seventeenth century misses the mark — what occurred was the transformation of tartan into a political text. The use of narrative as a political device, as executed by Defoe, is continually weaponised against Scotland throughout the eighteenth-century (and beyond). In order to control the body politic, England and the Aristocrats of Low-land Scotland removed tartan’s place in the Highlands, along with the people who lived there. Once the threat was removed, the chronicle of events was spun into a historical narrative which favoured a Romantic emplotment, thus removing the tragedy and injustice that occurred.
Indeed, William Scott discerns how tartan obtained a “cult status” once the ban was lifted in 1782 and became a fashion statement for Britain’s elite. This is again where the commoditisation and supposed ‘invention’ of tartan stems from.
Contrary to Trevor-Roper’s claim that the Highlanders propagated this movement themselves for their own gain, an anonymous article in The Scotsman from 1821 suggests the locals’ outrage:
“If the Celtic society confine itself to such parades as flatter only the ancestral pride…of the proprietors of the soil, without doing anything to relieve the…heavy distress of the population…the society is worse than mockery; for what can be more absurd than to see Highland Landlord assembling…to revive the dress of a people, whom they are either driving from their homes…or allowing them to be so expatriated without making one effort in their favour.” (qtd. Stroh, 123)
This statement is congruous with Louis A. Montrose’s idea of subversion and containment where there is a “capacity of the dominant order to generate subversion so as to use it to its own ends”(8). Silke Stroh underlines how in the narrative of Scotland’s history, “it is particularly important that subjugation and control function as perquisites for romanticization […] romantic nostalgia only set in after the ‘noble savages’ were under control”(116). The Scotsman article and recent historical portrayals such as Trevor-Roper’s reveal how the commodification of tartan had stripped Scotland of its right to dispute the previous banning of tartan itself, let alone the injustices of the Highland Clearances.The curator of the 2017 exhibit Bonnie Prince Charlie and The Jacobites in the National Museum of Scotland is fully aware that “history is written by the victors”(Forsyth, BBC). As a matter of fact, “until recently, its most potent historical symbol, the Clearances, was not featured in national museums […] the land reform debate of the late nineties and eventual legislation passed by the devolved assembly helped redefine the place of the Clearances in the national narrative”(Gouriévidis, 74). Even so, the storytelling of this set of events remains under debate, as historians are divided between viewing the Clearances as a natural agricultural change or a form of “ethnic cleansing”(Noble). Indeed, “a glorification and idealisation of tartan could be used to blink at the treatment of the Highlands and Highlanders”(Brown, 7), and it certainly was. It is this injustice which takes centre stage at Alexander McQueen’s 1995 fashion show, Highland Rape.
The show was initially dubbed “an insult to women as well as to Alexander’s own talent”(The Independent). The show featured models stumbling along the runway, adorned with slashed tartan and lace pieces, projecting an image of sexual assault. The MP for Dagenham at the time, Judith Church, was saddened by the publicity the show had attracted and was appalled at its portrayal of rape:
“Women want to look at fashion but they don’t want to see it in some way as portraying them as a victim — their clothes have been half ripped off — and that this is something that they should all be aspiring to…rape isn’t an attractive or pleasant experience for women.” (Kino Library)
Looking back on the reaction to the show, McQueen admits, “they completely misunderstood Highland Rape. It wasn’t anti-woman. It was actually anti the fake history of Vivienne Westwood. She makes tartan lovely and romantic and tries to pretend that’s how it was”(qtd. Scotland on Sunday). The swooping, elegant dresses made of tartan in Westwood’s designs starkly contrast with McQueen’s own showcase of tartan:
“[Highland Rape] featured models with legs that appeared to be stained with blood and visible tampon strings that made it all but impossible to focus on the slashed tartan kilts and expertly cut patchwork lace sheaths. The show was said to have been a memorial to the eighteenth-century British massacre of Scotland, but it was McQueen who was massacred in the press the next day.”
Vogue, 1997
The reaction to Highland Rape reveals its uncomfortable connection between fashion, the body, and history. By moving away from Westwood’s Romantic portrayal of tartan and Scotland, McQueen depicts a tragic history of the nation by presenting tartan as defiled. McQueen’s stumbling models and groin exposing dresses did not follow the standard of the body nor History as a narrative which presents “progress against a background of romance”(Pathé). Instead, the cloth is used as a political text commenting on the tragic events of Scotland which had been lost in Westwood’s swathes of Romance.
In 1992, a fashion exhibition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMoA) stated, “like other forms, [fashion] is both an immediate expression of contemporary culture and the genesis of a continuous history”. Through the discourse of the body, McQueen told stories through his clothes and the models that wore them. In commemoration of his death and his artwork, the MMoA held an exhibition, Savage Beauty, which “demonstrated how McQueen’s creations were inspired by traditions, folklore and historiography — often a historical revisionism dramatically inflected with personal memory”(Moon, 103). Through his slashed tartan and lace, caged models and ‘bumster’ trousers, McQueen did not assault the female body but used it to “reflect the prejudices and limitations of the audiences’ aesthetic judgments”(Stępień, 172). By imbuing his clothes with his ‘historical revisionism’, in telling tragic stories beautifully, McQueen’s fashion reveals the revisionism of the body, and in doing so, reveals the careful construction of historical narrative itself. Through his work, particularly Highland Rape, and in revisiting the one-sided conversation surrounding tartan, we can begin to acknowledge the various ways the history of Scotland has been represented, and in doing so, take steps to uncover a more refined, multi-layered narrative of its beautifully tragic making.
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