Tweed: History, Culture and Design

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Tweed is a widely used and internationally popular textile that has its origins in Scotland in the 1820s. This project aims to significantly advance knowledge about this hugely under-researched textile. For example, Clifford Gulvin's The Tweedmakers, which was the last major academic publication on the history of tweed, was written nearly forty years ago and there is a strong need to re-interpret this textile using more up-to-date methods. Furthermore, this project will be the first to examine the history of factory-produced tweeds in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The researcher has been studying tweed since 2001, work that has primarily focused on the late nineteenth century. This Fellowship will substantially further develop and extend this inter-disciplinary investigation. The international dissemination of the research will primarily be through a major book, titled Tweed, to be published by Berg Publishers.This publication will explore the history of tweed including its manufacture, design and consumption from its emergence in the 1820s to the present. The project will be the first to consider in depth the crucially important inter-connections between the histories of different types of tweed, from craft-produced Harris tweeds, to factory-produced ones from the British mainland. The research will focus primarily on British contexts, but given the importance of exports to this industry, it will also examine the international consumption of tweed. For example, exuberantly coloured tweeds designed by Bernat Klein and made in the Scottish Borders were widely used by French couturiers in the 1960s. This project will also further develop previous research on the inter-relationships of tweed with major social and cultural changes in terms of class, gender and local and national identities in the late nineteenth century. For example, in that era tweed was strongly coded as masculine and the project will explore whether changing gender relationships have continued to play an important role in the design and consumption of these textiles. A previous innovative article by the researcher has shown the important physical and conceptual links of tweed with place or landscape and with changing ideas about British, Scottish, and English identities in the late nineteenth century. This research will be extended to examine the hitherto unexplored relationships between fashion textiles and urban and rural landscapes in the eras of late modernity and post-modernity. Tweed is often associated in contemporary media with Britishness, Englishness, heritage and tradition. Furthermore, the interpretation of tweed by leading fashion designers, such as Mary Quant and Vivienne Westwood, has focused on a fascination with its supposedly 'traditional' character. This study seeks to explore and explain how these connotations relate to the history of this textile and why they have such a strong contemporary resonance. The project also addresses the broader objective of aiming to develop and encourage new interdisciplinary approaches to the study of wool textiles. Through its focus on the design and consumption of tweed, it seeks to raise alternative questions to the existing research on British wool textiles, which focuses almost exclusively on taking economic history approaches to the English trade before 1830. The scarcity of published research on tweed means that the book will mainly draw on original sources, most of which have not been previously published. For example, this will include the Ceemo Tweed and Bernat Klein Collections held by National Museums Scotland. It will also involve interviews with individuals linked to the contemporary tweed industry. The research will also be disseminated through a partnership with Scottish Borders Council Museum and Gallery Service, which will involve collaborating on the development of an exhibition and associated education events.