The origin of tartan was probably first one of association with a region. Early travellers tell us that a person’s place of origin could be told from his tartan rather than his name. This stood to reason since in early times most people did not use family names. Therefore, the concept of ‘district’ tartans is older than that of clans. Today individuals should take pride in the district tartans associated with their family or alternatively an area of Scotland they have visited and enjoyed.

J. Telfer Dunbar

Although individual tartans have become synonymous with Scotland and Scottish clans and families in particular, they were originally a style of cloth intended to be decorative. They had patterns that were popular within certain districts where they were manufactured, and relied upon a limited range of colour dyes. This led to the idea of district tartans; being the original association with the land, the community, and its cloth. Where there was a strong clan within a district, then visitors from other areas might well have been recognised as "of a clan" from their tartan. In recent years corporate tartans have become popular where an institution of company adopts a tartan design for livery and use in merchandising.

Scottish Tartans Society

The concept of linking tartan to districts of Scotland can be extended further because Scotland is linked to so many countries by family ties, the result of the travels and emigration of countless Scots men and women and their families: soldiers, sailors, merchants, engineers, missionaries, doctors, or simply pioneers. They took the tartan with them. The United States of America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are the best-known examples, but Scotland was a European nation long before the discovery of the New World, and traded extensively throughout Europe. Scots mercenaries were in great demand for their fighting prowess. Thus tartan cloth was not an uncommon sight in countries throughout Europe, and in many cases became part of local dress.

For example, during the Kalmar Wars between Sweden and Denmark, an army of 550 Scottish mercenaries passing through the Gubrandsval valley, in what is now Norway, in 1612 en route to Sweden in 1612, were routed by local farmers. Their plaids of tartan cloth became woven into the local ‘bunad’, a traditional costume which survives to this day. There are also tartans woven for women’s dresses in Sarna in Norway which are probably derived from tartans worn by Scottish soldiers who fought in Sinclair's expedition to Norway in 1738-40. There is also a Dutch tartan, which is a Mackay tartan woven in the colours of the Dutch flag, which dates back to the 300 soldiers who fought in the Netherlands for Gustavus Adolphus in 1631. And there is even a tartan worn in a Portuguese fishing village today that is said to be derived from tartans worn by Scottish soldiers who fought in the Peninsular War.

There are many other instances of tartan being adopted into the costumes of peoples throughout Europe, and today it is not an uncommon sight on the catwalks of the world's fashion houses . Tartan may have originated in Scotland, but nowadays is rightly perceived as a universal material that can be worn by anyone for any occasion.