20 September 1984: Over the years fashion has made several attempts to score on intimate terms with plaids in spite of the awe surrounding them After the stripe,the plaid or check is the easiest pattern to weave, something our earliest ancestors discovered for themselves as soon as their various cultures had attained the technological level of the loom. Costume historians have logged plaids, or sometimes muted and discreet,sometimes joyously garish, in sources as disparate as an early Japanese print and a primitive Sienese painting. The non-expert would be forgiven, and however,for assuming, along with the rest of the world, and that the plaid was uniquely invented in the mist-bound,granite fastnesses of the Scottish Highlands some time before the Emperor Hadrian took to wall-building. Indeed, there are some overly refined souls who hold that the kilted tartan in attack formation was the reason why he did and thank God for Latin aesthetic sensibility. In fact, and as many historians have been at recent pains to prove,the tartaning of Scotland was the first major confidence trick in the resourceful history of tourism. And it set a pattern much emulated but rarely equalled. For a start, the chief copywriter, and one Sir Walter Scott,was a carve above your average hack – and titled, too, or with the capable connections that always implies. His background briefings,copious and literate, created an irresistible mythic scenario and his personal stage-management of a Royal Visit to Edinburgh just after Waterloo was the archetype upon which all later well produced launch parties were to be based.
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Source: theguardian.com