Meet the team breathing new life into traditional tartan
Ten years ago, Clare Campbell was working as an accountant in the oil and gas industry. She was feeling disillusioned by her job and the death of her father had brought back the grief she felt after losing her brother, a decade earlier, when he was just 19. Realising how fragile life could be, Clare wanted to dedicate more time to a cause she was passionate about.
Clare had grown up in the Highlands and started looking into tartan, once integral to the local dress (see overleaf ), and discovered that much of it was no longer made nearby. “Tartan is part of our DNA,” she says, “and yet all the fabric I found was produced elsewhere. I wanted to bring it back for the Highlanders.”
Clare’s idea was to start a new mill and tartan fashion brand. “At the time, tartan seemed to weave its way into every aspect of my life,” she says. “It’s about family and legacy, and people doing courageous things, so I felt emotionally connected to it.”
Clare realised that, in starting a business, she could put her accountancy knowledge to good use, too: “The sorts of audits and financial reviews I’d done over the years would help me understand the weaving industry and how it could be revived.”
At first, Clare ran Prickly Thistle, her clothing brand, from her shed, commissioning local mills to produce small runs of her tartan designs. Then she set her sights on a tartan mill of her own. With no bank willing to loan her enough money, she launched a campaign on Crowdfunder, the fundraising platform. Its success enabled her to rent a space in Evanton, a village just north of Inverness, and employ two local fashion and textiles students. Clare was keen to use traditional looms but finding them was a challenge. “Someone told me about some disused Dobcross shuttle looms in the Borders for sale,” she recalls. “I couldn’t tell if anything was missing because I had no idea how to even turn them on.”
Fortunately, she found a couple of people who could operate and repair them. Martin Dent, now nearly 80, had started working in Irish linen mills when he was 18, while former engineer Ross Roger had once built and serviced heavy plant machinery.
As the first B Corp textiles mill in the UK, Prickly Thistle puts sustainability at the heart of everything it does. It all starts, Clare says, with economical designs: “So much fabric is wasted when standard patterns are cut. We put blood, sweat and tears into weaving our cloth; I don’t want to see it on the cutting-room floor, so we’ve worked out how to make clothes without curves.”
For a brand that makes everything from coats and kilts to dungarees and dresses, this sounds like a challenge, but Clare says her approach is remarkably like how tartan garments were made in the past. “People think we’re putting a modern spin on tartan, but our process is traditional,” she explains. “Kilts were originally zero-waste as they were just a huge rectangle of cloth folded in various ways. We design our clothes with that in mind.” Prickly Thistle kilts, for example, can be worn as capes and the drapes of fabric on the jackets can be pinned across or left to hang as a longer design. They can even be worn “upside down” for a different look.
All the garments are made of natural fibres, such as wool, that biodegrade or can be recycled, continues Clare, who oversees the team of 12. The makers prepare the warp threads on the loom by hand using a large wheel and creel, then set off the “shuttles” to fly back and forth, creating the weft. By alternating blocks of colour vertically and horizontally, they create a tartan’s distinctive pattern or “sett”. “Modern looms may churn out textiles faster, but they don’t need people to the same extent,” says Clare. “I wanted to create jobs and bring back skills.”
To make sure Prickly Thistle doesn’t end up with too much surplus stock, most garments are made to order and released in “drops” four times a year. This encourages customers to think about what they buy. Even after people have bought garments, Clare wants to make sure they are sustainable, offering people advice about how to clean them in an environmentally friendly way.
“Wool has antibacterial properties, meaning you don’t really need to wash it. All it needs is a good airing,” she says. While the process might be traditional, Prickly Thistle is breathing new life into tartan by creating new patterns and colourways.
A few years ago, the designers came up with Aliam, a pink, blue and yellow design, for the actors Alan Cumming and Miriam Margolyes, when they visited the factory as part of a tour of Scotland. Other designs have been made for local businesses and even Dennis the Menace, when he turned 70 (his tartan matched his iconic black and red jumper). Clare has grand ambitions for tartan, too. One day, she hopes it will have the same protected status as Harris tweed.
“I started out wanting to revive weaving with a single mill,” she says. “Now, we’re getting closer to bringing home a whole industry that’s part of the fabric of the Highlands.”
Find out more about Prickly Thistle.
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