Why Meghan Markle led me on a tartan quest
It’s tragic, I know. A hangover from five years of working at Tatler, but my first thought on seeing Meghan Markle walking around Edinburgh in that tartan coat was genuinely, “Oooh. I wonder whose tartan that is?”
I don’t mean who made the coat. Burberry made it. And it’s still available for £1,995 if you’re one of those slight weirdos, no offence, who sees a Royal wearing an item of clothing – Kate Middleton’s Issa engagement dress, Prince George’s soldier jersey – and immediately buys it yourself.
No, what I mean is what actual tartan is that? What’s its name? Because all tartans have a name and even though it’s 2018 and we’re largely safe from the Jacobites, some people can be terrifically snotty about tartan. About their tartan. I know someone exceptionally grand – and English but claims Scottish “roots” – whose bedroom is wallpapered in “the family tartan”. Imagine meeting him in a bar and deciding he was your dream man, then going back to his place and having that explained to you. Hmm.
Anyway, point being, if Meghan had stepped out in a coat that was made from, say, the Campbell clan’s tartan then that could have caused some sort of diplomatic incident. The chief of the Campbell clan (the Duke of Argyll, FYI) might have been forced to march on Kensington Palace with a Lochaber axe (although I happen to know him and he’s quite a sweet chap, as dukes go, so perhaps he would have just sent Meghan a polite but firm email).
The story of tartan and how families came to claim their own is slightly confused. Virgil and Tacitus wrote about Celts in “striped cloaks” but there isn’t much talk of tartan between then and the 16th century. No photos seem to have survived, weirdly. By the 1500s, there are accounts that talk about Scottish villagers wearing whatever tartan the local weaver had knocked up. But they weren’t “personal” tartans. They didn’t have names. People simply wore what they could get.
It was in the early 19th century that the whimsical romantic Sir Walter Scott encouraged a tartan revolution and people started getting a teeny tiny bit pretentious about having their own pattern. Then Queen Victoria and Albert bowled along and fuelled the fashion for Scotland in general and tartan specifically by plastering Balmoral in the stuff. The Balmoral tartan, a grey, red and black plaid designed by Albert in 1853, is what the Royal family still wear today and, apart from the Queen’s bagpiper, nobody else is allowed to wear it. To be honest, though, I’m not sure you’d want to because it’s grey and black and designed to look like the granite of Deeside. Awfully drab. I don’t think Albert can have worked very hard on it but then he never was a bundle of laughs.
If Meghan had stepped out in a coat that was made from, say, the Campbell clan’s tartan then that could have caused some sort of diplomatic incident
Posh families followed suit and had their own tartan run up. And if you want to have a look at them, I highly recommend spending several hours on a website called the Scottish Register of Tartans (I know how to live). Established by the Scottish parliament, it’s a site that lists every official tartan pattern in the world. The Balmoral one’s on there, obviously. Madonna’s got one (a blue, purple and white pattern made commemoratively after her wedding in Scotland in 2001). Ivanka Trump’s is listed on it (a red and white check, and I would love to be rude about it but it’s pretty nondescript). The North American Sheep Breeders Association has another. Honestly, it’s fascinating. All of life on one website.
The only thing I couldn’t track down on this site was the tartan of Meghan’s coat. Help! What was it? Had she committed some grave faux-pas? I needed to know. So I spent several more hours on the tartan website and then realised, in the end, that I could just email my pal Emma who works at Burberry. And you’ll all be greatly relieved to hear it’s one of Burberry’s own patterns and so she hasn’t done anything that could lead to cries of cultural appropriation. Phew.
