Mad About Plaid: A Crash Course in Tartan Terminology

Jumping off of what was said during the in-class critique about potentially having the Montgomery tartan that I designed printed and bringing more heritage into my work, I decided to work more on tartan design this week.  Although I have played with designing generic tartans, perfecting the Montgomery Dress design is pretty important to me and I'm not quite satisfied yet.  I've worked on it significantly before this class too. Examples of previous work on this project is in the next post, Week 2 Work.
This post is all about what a tartan is and how they're classified.  There is a lot of terminology associated with tartan design, most of which I've picked up just from my experience as a consumer with an industry that deals very directly with them, some of which I've researched for the purposes of designing.
Supposedly, the term tartan is most likely derived from the French word tiertain, from the verb tirer which means to draw and references woven cloth, and from the Gaelic braecan, a term used to describe patterned cloth with many colours.  Over time these may have combined into the word tartan.  The term plaid is largely an American classification of the generic pattern of any given tartan.   In Scottish culture, plaid is usually a noun, not an adjective, that refers to either the length of fabric worn over the shoulder or tartan cloth that is not meant to be worn, like a blanket or a tablecloth.    The term tartan may refer to the style of pattern, but usually it is used to describe any specific check pattern used to identify a clan or society. Most clans (family groups) have several tartans or several versions of the same tartan. Sometimes even regional sects (smaller groups from different places) of a clan have tartans that are different from each other.  One small square section of any tartan pattern is called a sett, hence the title of this blog.  This is more important for weavers, because the threadcount of each colour and the total threadcount of a tartan is listed per sett, not for the entire woven piece.
  Different terms used to describe a tartan, although they would seem to describe the time period or the activity for which the tartan was/is worn, are really only references to its colour palette.

Dress doesn't mean that this variation of the tartan is meant to be any more formal than the others, but simply that the tartan includes large areas of white.
A Hunting Tartan usually uses more natural and muted tones of earthy colours like blue, green, and brown.
An Ancient Tartan uses light, muted colours that appear to have aged over time, even though the tartan may have been designed recently.  These colours are typically generated, or are designed to look as if they are generated, by natural dyes.
A Modern Tartan is coloured with chemical dye, which means that it can include much brighter colours than a tartan made by natural dyes.  Arguably, these tartans may be considered less traditional.
Fashion tartans are not associated with clans.  They are usually designed for just that--fashion.  However, in the Highland Dancing world in particular, there are several fashion tartans that are derived from actual clan tartans.  These may imitate the existing check of a clan tartan but colourise the sett.  A lot of them use really bright colours. Most recently, they have started to venture away from the typical reds, royal blues, deep greens, and purples, and are now available in turquoise blue, fuschia, and lime green, which are not very traditional colours.
A tartan can be more than one of these things at once, where the definitions do not contradict each other.  For example, a tartan can be a modern and a dress, an ancient and a dress, a dress and a fashion, or a fashion and a hunting, and so on.

Here are some examples using the many tartans of the MacRae Clan to show how these different terms apply.

1) Standard MacRae tartan (there may be more than one standard but this is just the first one I found):

2) The MacRae Hunting Tartan

3) Two Regional variations of the clan tartan: MacRae of Ardentoul and MacRae of Conchra

 

4) Dress MacRae (the black colour variation is also sometimes referred to as Dress Scott, red is the dominant colour in the non-dress versions as well except for Hunting)

5) Dress Red Ancient MacRae (this is a more recently designed variation, but uses colours that are meant to look as if they have faded from the standard bright red)

6) Fashion Dress MacRae in purple, blue, royal blue (the difference between the two blues being the colour of the other stripes), teal, the previously featured red, a darker shade of red referred to as wine, and the newer ones, turquoise, fuschia and BRAND NEW! lime green (these are pretty much all designed specifically for dance kilts)

(Unfortunately I can't find a good picture of the regular blue dress.  Below is the Dress Royal Blue.  The difference is the yellow stripe - in the regular blue, the stripes are teal and purple instead of yellow and white.)

(I also can't find the super fun bright turquoise and fuschia in swatches, sorry.  But here's lime!)