User:SMcCandlish/Incubator/Tartan design and weaving



Tartan design and weaving encompasses the specification and manufacture of tartan cloth. Tartan (sometimes called "plaid", especially in North America) is a woven textile pattern in which the warp and weft consist of (usually matching) sequences of coloured stripes that cross each other, with the pattern repeating horizontally and vertically across the cloth. Traditional Scottish-style tartan fabric is a 2/2 twill weave of worsted wool, which up close produces an alternating series of diagonal "ribs" of colour, and from further back the appearance of additional, blended colours where solid colours cross. Unlike in a check (chessboard or dicing) pattern, solid colours in a tartan cannot be next to each other, only next to blended ones.

A particular tartan's pattern is called a sett, recorded in a thread count. For a typical symmetric or mirroring tartan, the thread count is repeated in reverse when the end of it is reached, then reversed again when the beginning is reached again, and so on. In a rarer asymmetric tartan, the thread count is simply repeated when the end of it is reached. A mostly historical practice was to weave in one of four types of decorative selvedge at the end of the cloth. Tartan cloth is mass-manufactured on large power looms, but originated as a pre-industrial activity on hand looms, and can be woven by a dedicated hobbyist.

Tartan designs mostly fit into a number of identified styles: basic, split, superimposed, and multiple check (or some combination). There are no firm "rules" of tartan design, but some basic principles can be identified. Colours are bright and distinct enough to stand apart from each other but "soft" enough to effectively blend to create new hues. The more colours used, the more diffused the final pattern will be. There is no standard for tartan colours, nor a set of shared meanings of colours. The traditional range of colours has expanded since the 20th century. Tartan was historically produced with natural dyes, but artificial dyes supplanted them in the mid-19th century. Scottish tartans today are available from most manufacturers in a range of palettes, including deeply-saturated modern, and more subdued ranges with names like ancient, weathered, and muted.

The history of tartan weaving goes back to c. 2100 BC through the first centuries AD, among a partly Caucasoid population with Western-style looms, in Xinjiang, China. Similar material was found dating to to 1,200 BC in Austria, and found in later sites throughout Central and Northern Europe. The earliest simple tartan discovered in Scotland dates from the 3rd century AD. Medieval evidence is rare, but complex tartan appeared in a late 14th century Spanish painting, and was well-attested in 16th-century Scotland. Early tartan production was a cottage industry in the Scottish Highlands, with commerce first centred at Inverness, then by the mid-17th century at Aberdeen, with much of the material woven for export. The Dress Act, a ban on Highland dress in the Highlands after the Jacobite rebellions, suppressed tartan weaving in that area from 1746 to 1782, and manufacture instead consolidated along the border of the Highlands and Lowlands, especially at Bannockburn, home of William Wilson & Son, the dominant tartan weavers by the 1770s and into the early 20th century. Demand for tartan beyond Scotland led to the emergence of weaving competition in Norwich and other English cities. Tartan's popularity was greatly increased by the 1815 solicitation of official clan tartans from clan chiefs by the the Highland Society of London, and the 1822 tartan-kilted visit of King George IV to Scotland, leading to a weaving-industry boom and an explosion of new tartan designs. The cloth was further popularised by Queen Victoria throughout Britain and beyond.

Major commercial woollen tartan weavers today operate mostly in Scotland, with a few in England, Wales, Canada, and the United States. Tartan has also been manufactured in poly-viscose since the 1990s, for lighter-weight applications. Cloth in tartan patterns is produced in various other materials in China, France, Taiwan, and Turkey. Since the 19th century, a small number of tartan designers have produced an out-sized portion of the named, Scottish-style tartans in use today.

Tartan-patterned fabrics from the weaving traditions of other parts of the world often use different techniques, such as plain weave, damask, supplementary weaving, or ikat thread-dyeing.

Definitions of tartan
The Scottish Register of Tartans provides the following summary definition of tartan:

"Tartan (the design) is a pattern that comprises two or more different solid-coloured stripes that can be of similar but are usually of differing proportions that repeat in a defined sequence. The sequence of the warp colours (long-ways threads) is repeated in same order and size in the weft (cross-ways threads). The majority of such patterns (or setts) are symmetrical, i.e. the pattern repeats in the same colour order and proportions in every direction from the two pivot points. In the less common asymmetric patterns, the colour sequence repeats in blocks as opposed to around alternating pivots but the size and colour sequence of warp and weft remain the same."

In more detail, traditional tartan cloth is a tight, staggered 2/2 twill weave of worsted wool: the horizontal weft (also woof or fill) is woven in a simple arrangement of two-over-two-under the fixed, vertical warp, advancing one thread at each pass. As each thread in the weft crosses threads in the warp, the staggering by one means that each warp thread will also cross two weft threads. The result, when the material is examined closely, is a characteristic 45-degree diagonal pattern of "ribs" where different colours cross. Where a thread in the weft crosses threads of the same colour in the warp, this produces a solid colour on the tartan, while a weft thread crossing warp threads of a different colour produces an equal admixture of the two colours alternating, producing the appearance of a third colour – a halftone blend or mixture – when viewed from further back. (The effect is similar to multicolour halftone printing, or cross-hatching in coloured-pencil art.) Thus, a selection of two base colours produces three different colours including one blend, increasing quadratically with the number of base colours; so a selection of six base colours produces fifteen blends and a total of twenty-one different perceived colours. This means that the more stripes and colours used, the more blurred and subdued the tartan's pattern becomes. Unlike in simple checker (chequer) or dicing patterns (like a chessboard), no solid colour in a tartan appears next to another solid colour, only a blend (solid colours may touch at their corners).

James D. Scarlett (2008) offered a definition of a usual tartan pattern (some types of tartan deviate from the particulars of this definition): "The unit of tartan pattern, the sett, is a square, composed of a number of rectangles, square and oblong, arranged symmetrically around a central square. Each of these elements occurs four times, at intervals of ninety degrees, and each is rotated ninety degrees in relation to its fellows. The proportions of the elements are determined by the relative widths of the stripes that form them."

Sett and thread count
The sequence of thread colours in the sett (or setting) – the minimal design of the tartan, to be duplicated, or "the DNA of a tartan" – starts at an edge and either reverses or (rarely) repeats on what are called pivot points or pivots. In diagram A, the sett begins at the first pivot, reverses at the second pivot, continues, then reverses again at the next pivot, and will carry on in this manner horizontally. In diagram B, the sett proceeds in the same way as in the warp but vertically. The diagrams illustrate the construction of a typical symmetric (also symmetrical, reflective, reversing, or mirroring)  tartan. However, on a rare asymmetric (asymmetrical, or non-reversing) tartan, the sett does not reverse at the pivots, it just repeats at them. An old term for the latter type is cheek or cheeck pattern. Also, some tartans (very few among traditional Scottish tartans) do not have exactly the same sett for the warp and weft. This means the warp and weft will have differing thread counts. Asymmetric and differing-warp-and-weft patterns are more common in tartan-patterned madras cloth and some other weaving traditions than in Scottish tartan.

A tartan is recorded by counting the threads of each colour that appear in the sett. The thread count (or threadcount, thread-count) not only describes the width of the stripes on a sett, but also the colours used (typically abbreviated). Usually every number in a thread count is an even number to assist in manufacture. The first and last threads of the thread count are the pivots. A thread count combined with exact colour information and other weaving details is referred to as a ticket stamp or simply ticket.

There is no universally standardised way to write a thread count, but the different systems are easy to distinguish. As a simple example: In all of these cases, the result is a half-sett thread count, which represents the threading before the pattern mirrors and completes; a full-sett thread count for a mirroring (symmetric) tartan is redundant. A "/" can also be used between two colour codes (e.g. "W/Y24" for "white/yellow 24") to create even more of a shorthand threadcount for simple tartans in which half of the half-sett pattern is different from the other only in the way of a colour swap; but this is not a common style of thread-counting. Various writers and tartan databases do not use a consistent set of colour names and abbreviations, so a thread count may not be universally understandable without a colour key/legend. Some recorders prefer to begin a thread count at the pivot with the colour name (or abbreviation) that is first in alphabetical order (e.g. if there is a white pivot and a blue one, begin with blue), but this is actually arbitrary.
 * The thread count "/K4 R24 K24 Y4/" corresponds to a mirroring pattern of 4 black threads, 24 red threads, 24 black threads, 4 yellow threads, in which the beginning black and ending yellow pivots are repeated (after Y4/, the colours are reversed, first K24 then R24); this is a "full-count at the pivots" thread count.
 * An equivalent notation is boldfacing the pivot abbreviations: K4 R24 K24 Y4.
 * The same tartan could also be represented as "K/2 R24 K24 Y/2", in markup that indicates that the leading black and trailing yellow duplicated before continuing from these pivot points (after Y/2, the colours are reversed as Y/2 again, then K24, then R24); this is a "half-count at the pivots" thread count.
 * In the older and potentially ambiguous style of thread-counting, without the "/" (or bold) notation, a thread count like "K4 R24 K24 Y4" is assumed to be full-count at the pivots, unless the author clearly indicates otherwise.
 * An asymmetric tartan, one that does not mirror, would be represented in a full-sett thread count with "..." markup, as "...K4 R24 K24 Y4..." (after Y4, the entire pattern would begin again from K4).

Though thread counts are quite specific, they can be modified depending on the desired size of the tartan. For example, the sett of a tartan (e.g., 6 inches square – a typical size for kilts) may be too large to fit upon the face of a necktie. In this case, the thread count would be reduced (e.g. to 3 inches to a side). In some works, a thread count is reduced to the smallest even number of threads (often down to 2) required to accurately reproduce the design; in such a case, it is often necessary to up-scale the thread count proportionally for typical use in kilts and plaids.

Early collectors of tartan, like Logan in 1831, recorded setts by measuring the width of each stripe in eighths of an inch. A persistent legend that tartans were originally recorded on little "pattern sticks" has been dispelled as a "telephone game"-style progressive, willful misunderstanding of an early description of the warp as wrapped on a warp beam/roller for the loom. It was poorly described by Martin Martin in 1703 as "an exact Pattern of the Plad on a piece of Wood", which Logan (1831) misunderstood as a small stick used as a perpetual "record" of the tartan pattern on it, after which the "Sobieski Stuarts" in 1842 blatantly falsified a supposed 16th-century description of "pattern sticks", and Archibald Campbell (1890) repeated the story again as factual. No such artefact has ever been found by modern researchers, and the idea has been described as impractical because the threads would not stay put indefinitely, and it would make much more sense to simply write or draw the pattern on paper, or keep a strip of the woven material. Mackay (1924) claimed he had seen some examples and appeared to describe warp beams, but then claimed they were used as a long-term record of "clan tartans" of the area. Eslea MacDonald (2015) points out that Mackay had a tendency toward "manipulating the evidence" when advancing his ideas about very old clan tartans, and that he made up a fake-Gaelic name for the alleged pattern sticks.

Selvedge and fringe
A practice common into the 18th century, but rare today, is to add an accent on plaids or sometimes kilts in the form of a selvedge in herringbone weave at the edge, 1–3 inches (2.5–7.6 cm) wide, but still fitting into the colour pattern of the sett; a few modern weavers will still produce some tartan in this style. Sometimes more decorative selvedges were used: Selvedge marks were borders (usually on one side only) formed by repeating a colour from the sett in a broad band (often in herringbone), sometimes further bordered by a thin strip of another colour from the sett or decorated in mid-selvedge with two thin strips; these were typically used for the bottoms of belted plaids and kilts, and were usually black in military tartans, but could be more colourful in civilian ones. The more elaborate selvedge patterns were a wider series of narrow stripes using some or all of the colours of the sett; these were almost exclusively used on household tartans (blankets, curtains, etc.), and on two opposing sides of the fabric. The very rare total border is an all-four-sides selvedge of a completely different sett; described by Peter Eslea MacDonald (2019) as "an extraordinarily difficult feature to weave and can be regarded as the zenith of the tartan weaver's art", it only survives in Scottish-style tartan as a handful of 18th-century samples (in Scotland and Nova Scotia, Canada, but probably all originally from Scotland). The style has also been used in Estonia in the weaving of suurrätt shawls/plaids. Tartan used for plaids (not the belted plaid) often has a purled fringe.

Other elements and terms
The predominant colours of a tartan (the widest bands) are called the under-check (or under check, undercheck, under-cheque); sometimes the terms ground, background, or base are used instead, especially if there is one clearly dominant colour. Thin, contrasting lines are referred to as the over-check (also over-stripe or overstripe). Over-checks in pairs are sometimes referred to as tram lines, tramlines, or tram tracks. Bright over-checks are sometimes bordered on either side (usually both), for extra contrast, by additional thin lines, often black, called guard lines or guards. Historically, the weaver William Wilson & Son of Bannockburn sometimes wove bright over-checks in silk, to give some added shine (commercially around 1820–30, but in regimental officers' plaids back to at least 1794).

Tartan is usually woven balanced-warp (or just balanced), repeating evenly from a pivot point at the centre outwards and with a complete sett finishing at the outer selvedge; e.g. a piece of tartan for a plaid might be 24 setts long and 4 wide. An offset, off-set, or unbalanced weave is one in which the pattern finishes at the edge in the middle of a pivot colour; this was typically done with pieces intended to be joined (e.g. for a belted plaid or a blanket) to make larger spans of cloth with the pattern continuing across the seam; if the tartan had a selvedge mark or selvedge pattern, it was at the other side of the warp.

Before the 19th century, tartan was often woven with thread for the weft that was up to 1/3 thicker than the fine thread used for the warp, which would result in a rectangular rather than square pattern; the solution was to adjust the weft thread count to return the pattern to square, or make it non-square on purpose, as is still done in a handful of traditional tartans. Uneven warp-and-weft thread thickness could also contribute to a striped rather than checked appearance in some tartan samples.

The term hard tartan refers to a version of the cloth woven with very tightly wound, non-fuzzy thread, producing a comparatively rougher and denser (though also thinner) material than is now typical for kilts. It was in common use up until the 1830s. There are extant but uncommon samples of hard tartan from the early 18th century that use the more intricate herringbone instead of twill weave throughout the entire cloth.

Loom and technique details
While modern tartan is primarily a commercial enterprise on large power looms, tartan was originally the cottage-industry product of rural weavers of the pre-industrial age, and can be produced by a dedicated hobbyist with a strong, stable hand loom. Since around 1808, the traditional size of the warp reed for tartan is 37 inches, the length of the Scottish ell (previous sizes were sometimes 34 and 40 inches). John Telfer Dunbar (1979) describes the setup thus:

"The reed varies in thickness according to the texture of the material to be woven. A thirty-Porter (which contains 20 splits of the reed) or 600-reed, is divided into 600 openings in the breadth of 37 inches. Twenty of these openings are called a Porter and into each opening are put two threads, making 1,200 threads of warp and as many of weft in a square yard of tartan through a 30-Porter reed."

Splits are also referred to as dents, and Porters are also called gangs.

Mary E. Black (1959) wrote that warping on a pegged warping board rather than a warping reel is more efficient, because threads do not have to be cut and tied on at each colour change. Other notes from Black include:

Black also wrote that keeping the shuttles arranged in the order of colour-use helps to establish a weaving rhythm, and that beating force depends on the sort of cloth being woven (firmer for "harder" cloth, such as for a kilt), but that over-beating may distort the rectangular patterns.

Basic styles
Traditional tartan patterns can be divided into several style classes. The most basic is a simple two-colour check of thick bands (with or without thin over-checks of one or more other colours). A variant on this splits one or more of the bands, to form squares of smaller squares instead of just big, solid squares; a style heavily favoured in Vestiarium Scoticum. A complexity step up is the superimposed check, in which a third colour is placed centrally "on top of" or "inside" (surrounded by) one of the base under-check colours, providing a pattern of nested squares, which might then also have thin, bright and/or black over-checks added. Another group is multiple checks, typically of two broad bands of colour on a single dominant "background" (e.g. red, blue, red, green, red – again possibly with contrasting narrow over-checks). The aforementioned types can be combined into more complex tartans. In any of these styles, an over-check is sometimes not a new colour but one of the under-check colours "on top of" the other under-check. A rare style, traditionally used for arisaid (earasaid) tartans but no longer in much if any Scottish use, is a pattern consisting entirely of thin over-checks, sometimes grouped, "on" a single ground colour, usually white. M. Martin (1703) reported that the line colours were typically blue, black, and red. Examples of this style do not survive, at least not in the tartan databases (there may be preserved museum pieces with such patterns). Some tartan patterns are more abstract and do not fit into any of these styles, especially in madras cloth.

Design principles
There are no codified rules or principles of tartan design, but a few writers have offered some considered opinions. Banks & de La Chapelle (2007) summarized, with a view to broad, general tartan use, including for fashion: "Color – and how it is worked – is pivotal to tartan design.... Thus, tartans should be composed of clear, bright colors, but ones sufficiently soft to blend well and thereby create new shades." James D. Scarlett (2008) noted: "the more colours to begin with, the more subdued the final effect", or put more precisely, "the more stripes to the sett and the more colours used, the more diffuse and 'blurred' the pattern". That does not necessarily translate into subtlety; a tartan of many colours and stripes can seem "busy".

Scarlett (2008), after extensive research into historical Highland patterns (which were dominated by rich red and medium green in about equal weight with dark blue as a blending accent – not accounting for common black lines), suggested that for a balanced and style:

"any basic tartan type of design should have for its background, a 'high impact' colour and two others, of which one should be the complement to the first and the other a darker and more neutral shade; other colours, introduced to break up the pattern or as accents, should be a matter of taste. It is important that no colour should be so strong as to 'swamp' another; otherwise, the blending of colours at the crossing will be adversely affected. ... Tartan is a complex abstract art-form with a strong mathematical undertone, far removed from a simple check with a few lines of contrasting colours scattered over it."

Scarlett (1990) provided a more general explanation, traditional styles aside: "Colours for tartan work require to be clear and unambiguous and bright but soft, to give good contrast of both colour and brightness and to mix well so as to give distinctly new shades where two colours cross without any one swamping another."

Further, Scarlett (1990) held that "background checks will show a firm but not harsh contrast and the overchecks will be such as to show clearly" on the under-check (or "background") colours. He summed up the desired total result as "a harmonious blend of colour and pattern worthy to be looked upon as an art form in its own right".

Omitting traditional black lines has a strong softening effect, as seen in a 1970s Missoni fashion ensemble and in many madras patterns. A Scottish black-less design (now the Mar dress tartan) dates to the 18th century; another is Ruthven (1842, ), and many of the Ross tartans (e.g. 1886, ), as well as several of the Victorian–Edwardian MacDougal[l] designs, are further examples. Various modern tartans also use this effect, e.g. Canadian Maple Leaf (1964). Clever use of black or another dark colour can produce a visual perception of depth.

Hues and dyes
There is no set of exact colour standards for tartan hues; thread colour varies from weaver to weaver even for "the same" colour. A certain range of general colours, however, are traditional in Scottish tartan. These include blue (dark), crimson (rose or dark red), green (medium-dark), black, grey (medium-dark), purple, red (scarlet or bright), tan/brown, white (actually natural undyed wool, called lachdann in Gaelic), and yellow. Some additional colours that have been used more rarely are azure (light or sky blue), maroon, and vert (bright or grass green), plus light grey (as seen in Balmoral tartan, though it is sometimes given as lavender). Since the opening of the tartan databases to registration of newly designed tartans, including many for organisational and fashion purposes, a wider range of colours have been involved, such as orange and pink, which were not often used (as distinct colours rather than as renditions of red) in old traditional tartans. The Scottish Register of Tartans uses a long list of colours keyed to hexadecimal "Web colours", sorting groups of hues into a constrained set of basic codes (but expanded upon the above traditional list, with additional options like dark orange, dark yellow, light purple, etc.). This helps designers fit their creative tartan into a coding scheme while allowing weavers to produce an approximation of that design from readily stocked yarn supplies.

In the mid-19th century, the natural dyes that had been traditionally used in the Highlands  (like various lichens, alder bark, bilberry, cochineal, heather, indigo, woad, and yellow bedstraw) began to be replaced by artificial dyes, which were easier to use and were more economic for the booming tartan industry, though also less subtle. Although William Morris in the late-19th-century Arts and Crafts movement tried to revive use of British natural dyes, most were so low-yield and so inconsistent from locality to locality (part of the reason for the historical tartan differentiation by area) that they proved to have little mass-production potential, despite some purple dye (cudbear) commercialisation efforts in Glasgow in the 18th century. The hard-wound, fine wool used in tartan weaving was rather resistant to natural dyes, and some dye baths required days or even weeks. The dyeing also required mordants to fix the colours permanently, usually metallic salts like alum; there are records from 1491 of alum being imported to Leith, though not necessarily all for tartan production in particular. Some colours of dye were usually imported, especially red cochineal and to some extent blue indigo (both expensive and used to deepen native dyes), from the Low Countries, with which Scotland had extensive trade since the 15th century. Aged human urine (called fual or graith) was also used, as a colour-deepener, a dye solubility agent, a lichen fermenter, and a final colour-fastness treatment. All commercially manufactured tartan today is coloured using artificial not natural dyes, even in the less saturated colour palettes.

Scottish tartans that use two or more hues of the same basic colour are fairly rare. The best known is the British royal family's Balmoral (1853, two greys, both as under-check). Others include: MacDuff (Highland Society version, c. 1815; two greens, one a thick over-check); Akins (1850, two reds, one as over-check and sometimes rendered purple), MacBean (1872, two reds, one as over-check and sometimes rendered purple), Childers Universal regimental (1907, two greens, both under-check), Gordon red (recorded 1930–1950 but probably considerably older; two blues and two reds, one of each used more or less as over-checks), Galloway district hunting/green (1939/1950s, two greens, both under-check), US Air Force Reserve Pipe Band (1988, two blues, both under-check), McCandlish   (1992, three variants, all under-check), Isle of Skye district (1992, three greens, all arguably under-check, nested within each other), and Chisholm Colonial (2008, two blues, one an over-check, the other nearly blended into green). The practice is more common in very recent commercial tartans that have no association with Scottish families or districts, such as the Loverboy fashion label tartan (2018, three blues, one an over-check).

Colour palettes
The hues of colours in any established tartan can be altered to produce variations of the same tartan. Such varying of the hues to taste dates to at least the 1788 pattern book of manufacturer William Wilson & Son of Bannockburn. Today, the semi-standardised colour schemes or palettes (what marketers might call "colourways") are divided generally into modern, ancient, muted, and weathered (sometimes with other names, depending on weaver). These terms only refer to relative dye "colourfulness" saturation levels and do not represent distinct tartans.


 * Modern
 * Also known as ordinary; refers to darker tartan, with fully saturated colours. In a modern palette, setts made up of blue, black, and green tend to be obscured because of the darkness of the colours in this scheme.


 * Ancient
 * Also known as old colours (OC); refers to a lighter palette of tartan. These hues are ostensibly meant to represent the colours that would result from natural-dyed fabric aging over time. However, the results are not accurate (e.g., in real examples of very old tartan, black often fades toward khaki or green while blue remains dark; and natural dyes are capable of producing some very vibrant colours in the first place, though not very consistently). This style originated in the first half of the 20th century. This ancient is not to be confused with the same word in a few names of tartans such as "ancient Campbell".


 * Weathered
 * Also called faded; refers to tartan that is even lighter (less saturated) than ancient, as if exposed for a very long time. This style was invented in the late 1940s.


 * Muted
 * Refers to tartan which is between modern and ancient in vibrancy. Although this type of colouring is very recent, dating only from the early 1970s, these hues are thought to be the closest match to the colours attained by natural dyes used before the mid-19th century.

Some particular tartan mills have introduced other colour schemes that are unique to that weaver and only available in certain tartans. Two examples are Lochcarron's antique, between modern and ancient; and D. C. Dalgliesh's reproduction, a slight variation on weathered, dating to the 1940s and claimed to be based on 18th-century samples.

A general observation about ancient/old, weathered/faded, and muted are that they rather uniformly reduce the saturation of all colours, while actual natural-dyed tartan samples show that the historical practice was usually to pair one or more saturated colours with one or more pale ones, for greater clarity and depth, a "harmonious balance". According to Scarlett (1990): "The colours were clear, bright and soft, altogether unlike the eye-searing brilliance or washed-out dullness of modern tartans".

The same tartan in the same palette from two manufacturers (e.g. Colquhoun muted from D. C. Dalgliesh and from Strathmore) will not precisely match; there is considerable artistic license involved in exactly how saturated to make a hue.

Tartan-generation software can approximate the appearance of a tartan in any of these palettes. The examples below are all the "Prince Charles Edward Stuart" tartan:

Meanings
The idea that the various colours used in tartan have a specific meaning is purely a modern one, notwithstanding a legend that red tartans were "battle tartans", designed so they would not show blood. It is only recently created tartans, such as Canadian provincial and territorial tartans (beginning 1950s) and US state tartans (beginning 1980s), that are stated to be designed with certain symbolic meaning for the colours used. For example, green sometimes represents prairies or forests, blue can represent lakes and rivers, and yellow might stand for various crops. In the Scottish Register of Tartans (and the databases before it), colour inspiration notes are often recorded by a tartan's designer. However, there is no common set of tartan colour or pattern "motifs" with allusive meanings that is shared among designers.

Romanticised legends about such a thing go back quite a way, however. James Logan (1831) claimed that early tartans ranged from complex to simple as a matter of strict social hierarchy, with chiefs having up to seven colours, and clansmen fewer and fewer as their rank diminished, with servants only permitted to wear plain cloth and not tartan at all. Frank Adam (1908) repeated this story as if factual. However, the idea was lifted from the Irish story of Eochaid Étgudach, a legendary ancient Irish king in the Lebor Gabála Érenn, said to have passed a sumptuary law limiting clothing colours by social status, during his very short reign of only four years (some time bewteen 1537 and 1155 BC). It is old Irish folklore and nothing to do with the history of Scottish tartan. To the extent that complex tartans could convey something about social class, it was simply that monied persons were more able to afford the extra dye and weaving-labour expenses.

According to Sir Thomas Innes of Learney (1971), and expert on both heraldry and tartan:

"The late J. G. Mackay, like Lord Archibald Campbell, claimed that clan tartans were not only deliberately arranged, but formed an elaborate system of identification by dress, as technical as armorial bearings .... [T]artans were never intended to, and did not, have the precise distinctions and ready recognisability of armorial bearings. Mr Mackay gives much interesting information ...; he does not, however, succeed in adducing evidence that there was a scientific system of arrangement, and circumstances are against the existence of a."

In summary, Mackay (1924) believed that lines of various colours formed a heraldic system of cadency (differencing) between related family branches. The argument depends on the Victorian-era clan tartans having been used in the 17th–18th centuries, but all modern tartan scholarship shows this idea to be broadly false. Just as dubiously, Black (1959) claimed, without any evidence at all, that clans had multiple tartans because one belonged to the chief's family while others designated different occupations within a clan, and that various clan tartans are the product of combining tartan designs after clans merged (along with other strange ideas, such as that clan tartans were introduced originally by the Romans). These ideas are not to be found in modern tartan and clan-history research (nor even in earlier ones), and the adoption of most clan tartans can be traced to specific Victorian and later works.

More abstractly, from an art criticism perspective, design historian Richard Martin (1988) wrote of tartans as designs and tartan as a textile class having no truly endemic or objectified meanings, but being an art that "has the property of being a vessel or container of meaning, a design form that exists not only in history but through history", capable of conveying radically different, even contradictory, contextual meanings "ever changing and evolving" through socio-cultural transmutation of the fabric's use. Thus, tartan could veer from symbol of anti-union and Jacobite Highland rebellion to emblem of pan-British loyalty to empire in the space of two generations, or serve different fashion markets in the same recent decades as both a sartorial status symbol of traditional values and a punk and grunge rebel banner.

Origins
The oldest tartan-patterned cloth ever discovered dates to c. 2100 BC through the first centuries AD, found with the often Caucasoid (light-haired, round-eyed)  Tarim or Ürümqi mummies of the Tarim Basin, including the Chärchän Man, buried around 1,000 BC with tartan leggings in the Taklamakan Desert. The twill material was woven with up to six colours and required a sophisticated loom of a type that seems to have originated in the West, and the textiles "possess motifs, dyes, and weaves that are characteristic of cultures that lie in that direction."

It is similar to tartan twill cloth of the Hallstatt culture of Central Europe. Some preserved samples, dating back to 1,200 BC and discovered near Salzburg, Austria, feature a two-colour mix of natural-coloured and dyed wool. and their similarities to Scottish tartan suggest continuity of tradition. Similar finds have been made elsewhere in Central Europe and Scandinavia into the Roman era   Classical Roman writers made various references to the continental Gauls, south of Britain, wearing striped or variegated clothing,   but it cannot be certain that they always referred to tartan.

The earliest tartan-style cloth found in Britain dates from the 3rd century AD; known as the "Falkirk tartan", it was found at Falkirk in Stirlingshire, Scotland, and has a simple "Border check" design, of undyed light and dark wool. Little survives relating to tartan from the Medieval era, though a late-14th-century painted altarpiece by the "Master of Estamariu" (in Catalonia, Spain) features a complex three-colour tartan, which is very similar to later-attested Scottish tartans. The oldest surviving sample of complex, dyed-wool tartan in Scotland is from the 16th century (when written records of the cloth there also begin); known as the "Glen Affric tartan", it was discovered near Glen Affric; its faded colours include green, brown, red, and yellow.

Early Scottish manufacture
By the late 16th century, tartan seems to have become ubiquitous in the Scottish Highlands, probably owing to the broader manufacture of woollen cloth increasingly supplanting linen. Its dense weave requiring specialised skills and equipment, tartan was not generally one individual's work but something of an early cottage industry in the Highlands – an often communal activity called calanas, including some associated folk singing traditions – with several related occupational specialties (wool comber, dyer, waulker, warp-winder, weaver) among people in a village, part-time or full-time, especially women. The spinning wheel was a late technological arrival in the Highlands, and tartan in this era was woven from fine (but fairly inconsistent) hard-spun yarn that was spun by hand on drop spindles. The era's commerce in tartans was centred on Inverness, the early business records of which are filled with many references to tartan goods. Tartan patterns were loosely associated with the weavers of particular areas, owing in part to differences in availability of natural dyes.

In 1622, the Baron Courts of Breadalbane set fixed prices for different complexities of tartan and plain cloth, suggesting considerable weaving industry there as well. While tartan was still made in the rural Highlands as cottage industry, production by 1655 had re-centred on Aberdeen, where tartan was made "in greater plenty than [in] any other place of the nation whatsoever", though it was also manufactured in Glasgow, Montrose, and Dundee, much of it for export. In Glasgow at least, some of the trade was in tartan manufactured in the Highlands and the Hebrides and brought there for sale. Impressed by the trade in Glasgow, Richard Franck in his Northern Memoirs of 1658 wrote that the cloth was "the staple of this country".

18th-century manufacture
By the early 18th century, regional uniformity in tartan was sufficient to identify the area of origin. Martin Martin, in A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, published in 1703, wrote, after describing trews and belted plaids "of divers Colours ... agreeable to the nicest Fancy [sic]", that tartans could be used to distinguish the inhabitants of different places. Tartan manufacture (and weaving in general) were then centred in Bannockburn, Stirling, on the Highland–Lowland edge. By this time, there was also some demand for tartan in England, and weavers in Norwich, Norfolk, and some other English cities were attempting to duplicate Scottish product, but were considered the lower-quality option. In 1745, tartan-cloth advertising stressed variety and novelty of available patterns, not clan or regional.

The Dress Act 1746, after the failed Jacobite rising of 1745, banned the wearing of Highland dress by males (except the gentry and regiments) in the Scottish Highlands. Commercial production of tartan became re-centred in the Lowlands, in factory villages along the fringe of the Highlands, among companies like William Wilson and Son of Bannockburn (Wilsons for short, founded c. 1765), by then the dominant manufacturer with the rise of demand for tartan for military regimental dress. Wilsons were the first large-scale commercial tartan producers, and became the foremost supplier to the military by around 1770, and the dominant tartan weaver in general. It was an endeavor that required the introduction of tartan recording, of standardisation of setts and dyes, and of consistency and quality control. Wilsons recorded over 200 setts from the Highlands in addition to ones they designed in-house from the 1770s. These tartans were numbered, named after places, or given fanciful names such as "Rob Roy", later sometimes family names (after prominent members), sometimes foreign names like "Coburg", but usually not those of clans, nor, when they did, often matching present clan patterns. The Dress Act was repealed in 1782, but during the prohibition, traditional Highland techniques of wool spinning and dyeing, and the weaving of tartan there, had sharply declined.

Some tartan weaving did continue in the Highlands, and would even receive a boost in the late Georgian era. Tartan by this period had also become popular in Lowland areas including Fife and Lothian and the urban centres of Edinburgh and Stirling. Wilsons, aside from having a near-monopoly on regimental tartan, also was exporting (from 1797 to around 1830) large quantities for both men's and women's clothing, first to the British colonies in Grenada and Jamaica (where the affordable, durable, and bright material was popular for clothing enslaved people). The company also had clients in England, Northern and Central Europe, and a bit later in North and South America and the Mediterranean. However, by the end of the 18th century, they had "stiff competition" (in civilian tartan) from English weavers in Norwich. By this time, tartan had become popular among affluent Britons – largely due a combination of nostalgic "Celtic Twilight" romaticism and an association with the glory of the Highland regiments – even as the cloth had become increasingly abandoned by its original Highland peasant wearers. The trend seems to have started among women in Scotland dressing in the uniform tartans of their regimental husbands. But by the 1790s, some of the gentry were helping design new tartans for their own personal use, according to surviving records from Wilsons.

19th-century manufacture
In the early 19th century, tartan was already being marketed to the general public as "fancy" cloth with names that commemorated famous events and people, even fictional characters, inspiring a perception that tartans should be named. Some of the designs by leading weaver Wilsons of Bannockburn by this period were considered recognisable on sight. In 1815, the notion of clan tartans was broadly introduced by the Highland Society of London (a group mostly made up of expatriate Scottish aristocrats), led by Maj.-Gen. David Stewart of Garth; that year, the society solicited officially approved tartans from the Scottish clan chiefs and collected them into the 1820s. Uncertain what to provide, many (possibly most) turned to Wilsons for a design,   when they did not simply adopt a regimental tartan as their own. Wilsons were collaborating directly with the Highland Society by 1819, when the weaver produced their Key Pattern Book of around 250 setts, to which a large proportion of the modern clan tartans can be traced (though often originally with numbers or unrelated names). The collaboration provided Wilsons a great marketing opportunity, and the Highland Society provided a veneer of respectability as the weaver helped the society assign tartans to clan names. "Most of the pieces sealed [by clan chiefs] and deposited with the Society at that time were patterns woven, and in the majority of cases appear to have been designed, by Wilsons." Despite a popular belief in their antiquity, most of the clan tartans demonstrably date to the early to mid-19th century. By 1821, advertisements for tartan cloth had shifted to stress alleged authenticity instead of novelty.

The popularity of tartan and Highland dress was further and greatly reinvigorated by the royal visit of King George IV of the United Kingdom to Edinburgh in 1822, in a kilt and with a great deal of tartan-bedecked ceremony. The weaving industry boomed, and the number of available tartan patterns increased tenfold. This period of "tartanry" and "Highlandism" was continued by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who took up Scottish Highland residence for a time at Balmoral Castle and were heavily promotional of tartan and Highland dress. Victoria had intentionally made tartan more popular for the benefit of the British textile industry. By the 1860s, tartan was as popular in London as in Scotland. Leading weavers Wilsons of Bannockburn were producing £80,000 of product per year, and employed 500–600 people. Around 1860, new synthetic aniline dyes allowed for production of tartans in vivid colours at more affordable prices, and their lower cost translated into more consumption of tartan by the middle class.

Modern manufacture
The market-dominant Wilsons of Bannockburn amalgamated with another of the family businesses, a carpet-weaving operation, in 1867; the combined business entity continued until 1924.

Large-scale commercial weavers (tartan mills) of traditional tartan cloth that are operating today include Lochcarron of Scotland in Lochcarron and Selkirk; Ingles Buchan in Glasgow; House of Edgar (also a Highland dress vendor, and a subsidiary of Macnaughton Holdings) in Perth and Keith; Johnstons of Elgin (also a wool clothing maker), Strathmore Woollen in Forfar, and D. C. Dalgliesh in Selkirk, all three of which are now part of the Edinburgh-based Scotweb, under the trade name Clan; Prickly Thistle (also a women's clothing maker) in Evanton and Edinburgh; The Tartan Weaving Mill (also a weaving museum, and a subsidiary of Gold Brothers) in Edinburgh; Andrew Elliot Ltd in Selkirk; Stevens & Graham (specialising mostly in tartan rugs and carpet) in Rutherglen; Marton Mills in West Yorkshire, England; Cambrian Woollen Mill, in Powys, Wales; West Coast Woollen Mills in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; GK Textiles in Port Moody, BC (formerly Fraser & Kirkbright, Vancouver); and Pendleton Woolen Mills in Portland, Oregon, US.

The modern trade in wool tartan fabric has three principal markets: Highland dress, high fashion (with significant business from France and Italy), and furnishing.

Popular tartans (including for kilts and other Highland dress, as well as for school uniforms) have increasingly been manufactured, primarily in the UK, in poly-viscose (PV), a blend of the artificial materials polyester and viscose (rayon), typically in a 65% polyester to 35% viscose ratio. PV is promoted as washable, durable, crease-resistant but heat-settable for permanent pleating, shrinkage-resistant, stain-resistant, colour-fast, low-pilling, hypoallergenic, not attractive to clothes moths, more "breatheable" than polyester (thus good for athletics), lower cost than wool, and lighter weight than wool, but said to have a wool-like texture. It also does not rely on animal industry, so it appeals to vegans.

Large-scale global manufacturers of tartan-patterned cloth in a variety of cotton, polyester, viscose, nylon, etc., materials and blends include Başkan Tekstil in Istanbul and Bursa, Turkey; and Jeen Wei Enterprises in Taichung, Taiwan; while a leading maker of tartan ribbon is Satab in Saint-Just-Malmont, France. Tartan designs have long been produced in low-cost cotton in large quantities by various manufacturers in China.

Tartan designers
Aside from unnamed designers who produced the work of Wilsons of Bannockburn in the late 18th to mid-19th centuries, a number of individual designers of tartans have become noteworthy. Early on were the "Sobieski Stuarts" (John and Charles Allan) who were creating tartans for clans from as early as 1819 and certainly no later than 1829, when Wilsons were weaving many of their designs. Their work culminated in the publication of Vestiarium Scoticum in 1842 and The Costume of the Clans in 1845, purporting to reveal historical tartans, which were actually largely the contemporary creative work of the brothers. The majority of the clan tartans in use today can be traced to either Wilsons or the Sobieski Stuarts.

In the 20th century, a number of major authors on books about tartans have also been very active tartan designers, for the general public and for specific clients. James (Jamie) Desmond Scarlet (1920–2008) from Inverness (though born in London), a Royal Air Force veteran who was author of a number of books on tartan and its history and weaving, produced various tartans in the 1970s into the 2000s. Some of his designs and co-designs include the main Clan Boyd tartan (Boyd of Kilmarnock), one of the Clan Bell tartans, and Clan MacBean dress, as well as family tartans for Ayrton, Kelly, Mullikin, and Newlands (of Lauriston, sometimes reckoned a clan). He also produced a district tartan for the Mounth on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland, as well as organisational/corporate livery designs, for Amnesty International, the College of Radiographers, Furman University, and St. Andrew's Cathedral of Inverness. He also researched the reconstruction of a number of historic tartans, primarily in his book Tartan: The Highland Textile.

Scarlett sometimes collaborated with J. Charles Thompson (1917–1995) of Arlington, Virginia, author of So You're Going to Wear the Kilt and co-author of Scotland's Forged Tartans, e.g. on the American Bi-centennial commemorative tartan and the American Saint Andrews Societies design. Thompson is usually also attributed with one of the Clan MacTavish tartans called Thomson camel around 1950, which spurred some legal disputes with Burberry due to similarity to the company's trademarked "Burberry check". He also made the pattern for the Prince George County's Police Pipe Band (Maryland), and helped design the McCandlish family tartans in 1992. He was also the chairman of the Committee on Heraldry of the Council of Scottish Clan Associations.

A designer from the 1960s to 1990s of several tartans still in use today was D. Gordon Teall of Teallach (1922–1997), a president of the Scottish Tartans Society and co-author of District Tartans (1992). Teall was a World War II radio communications officer, and later a PhD specializing in medieval population and settlements. Some of his designs include the main tartan of Clan Forrester (once attributed to James Scarlett), and several Manx-oriented patterns, among others.

Probably the most prolific of modern tartans designers is Philip D. Smith Jr., of Georgia (US); the other co-author of District Tartans and separately the author of Tartan for Me, Tartans for the Irish and several other tartan books, he is also a former president of the International Association for Tartan Studies and a governor of the Scottish Tartans Authority. He independently designed (1960s–2000s) a district tartan for Ayrshire, and more for various US  and other places,  some of them officially adopted; the Clan Henderson dress/dance tartan, and a pattern for the Kelly of Sleat sept of Clan Donald;  and numerous family (Gates, Glenn, Kinross, Kirk, etc.), organizational, commemorative, and personal tartans. With Teall, he co-designed the Northern Ontario district tartan and a family tartan for Ainslie. Attribution of some designs has become confused in the tartan registry databases; e.g. two designs for Kelly of Sleat have been attributed to both Scarlett and Smith.

Another very active contemporary (2000s–2020s) tartan creator is Brian Wilton, director of the Scottish Tartans Authority, author of Tartans (2007), and operator of Tartan Ambassador Ltd, in Crieff, Scotland – perhaps the only tartan design company. He is responsible for the Clan Carruthers and Duncan of Sketraw setts; district tartans for Coigach and Eriskay, and one for South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands; plus numerous designs for organisations (American Scottish Foundation, Church of Scotland Guild, Educational Institute of Scotland, Glasgow Clyde College, International School of Aberdeen, Northfield Academy, Royal College of Midwives, Scottish Police Federation, YMCA, etc.), companies (Springbank distillery, and many others), events (New York City Tartan Week, World Youth Congress, etc.), and individuals.

Matthew A. C. Newsome, past director of the Scottish Tartans Museum in North Carolina, former governor of the Scottish Tartans Authority, and a frequent writer of tartan and Highland-dress historical articles, has designed (1990s–2010s) some institutional tartans including those of Western Carolina University and University of Georgia (US); as well as a variety of family tartans, for Breeden/Breeding, the Brewer sept of Clan Drummond, Cairns/Kearns of Finavon, Dickson of Kirkcudbrightshire, Dove, Halliday, McClurg, and others.

Peter A. Eslea MacDonald, also of Crieff, is the author of The 1819 Key Pattern Book: One Hundred Original Tartans and of a large number of historical tartan research articles, the head of research for the Scottish Tartans Authority, and a tartan and Highland-dress consultant for documentary and entertainment films, including Rob Roy (1995). He has designed tartans (1980s–2020s) for the Anderson of Kinnedear sept of Clan Anderson, Clan Graham (red dress/dance sett), Clan Lumsden (hunting), and the US society of Clan Hunter; a district tartan (with Brian Wilton) for Perthshire; patterns for families including Balfour, Gemmell, Laurie/Lawrie/Lowry,   MacCulloch/McCullough (not official Clan MacCulloch tartans),  Mann, Matheson (not an official Clan Matheson tartan), McClafferty, Newman, Stephens,  and Whitson; the official North Carolina and Georgia US state tartans; and setts for various organisations including British Army Medical Services, and companies such as British Airways, Caledonian Airways, Chanel, and the Mull Rugby Club;  as well as various fashion, commemorative, and individual tartans, and even one for a fictional animated-film character. Like Scarlett, Eslea MacDonald has used tartan design and weaving experience to reconstruct historical tartans from old portaits, fragmentary samples, etc.

Blair Urquhart ...

Aside from these tartan scholars, a rather specialised modern designer (2010s–2020s) is Margi Lawson of Tartan Manor Ltd (d.b.a. Ministry of Tartan). She is the creator of dozens of commemorative (civilian-wear) tartans for British military units and military-associated organisations like SSAFA, and her company (founded 2013 in Ashington, Northumberland) is the sole supplier of these designs. She has also produced a number of "fashion" tartans, and a few organisational ones, such as that of the Worshipful Company of Fletchers.

In other cultures
Tartan-style patterns exist in many weaving traditions around the world, and they are not always in 2/2 twill weave, nor of wool. Madras cloth of India (sometimes made in plain stripe as well as tartan) is usually a cotton muslin of plain weave, so it has a "pepper and salt" colour mixture where colours cross (a dot matrix, technically), not staggered diagonal lines (halftone) of Scottish-style tartan. It also usually lacks black lines, and is made with dyes that bleed together to create a more muted appearance. The tartan (shúkà) cloth of the Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania is also of cotton plain-weave construction.

Illustrated below are examples of: madras; tartan in a complex non-twill damask weave from Belarus; a mostly white tartan of silk with gold thread from Lithuania; a non-madras tartan sari from India, and a gira dress from Bhutan (where tartan is called mathra or sethra), that both feature decorative supplementary weaving or embroidery patterns where large stripes cross each other; and a kosode robe of late Edo-period Japan in tartan (kōshi) with ikat thread-dyeing that gives the pale stripes a mottled appearance.