The V&A Dundee is set to host the first major exhibition in Scotland focusing on tartan in 30 years.
Simply titled Tartan, the exhibition will open on April 1 and run through to January 14, 2024. It will present a "radical new look" at the instantly recognisable textile and pattern.
Celebrating tartan and its global impact, the exhibition explores how the patterned cloth has connected and divided communities all over the world, how it has embraced tradition, expressed revolt, and inspired great works of art as well as playful and provocative designs.
When it opens, Tartan will bring a "dazzling" selection of more than 300 objects from over 80 lenders worldwide to the V&A Dundee. These will illustrate tartan’s universal and enduring appeal through iconic and everyday examples of fashion, architecture, graphic and product design, photography, furniture, glass and ceramics, film, performance and art.
The exhibition will include loans from across Scotland and around the world, including Chanel, Dior, Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, Tate, V&A, National Museums of Scotland, National Trust for Scotland, National Theatre of Scotland, The Royal Collection, Fashion Museum Bath, the Highland Folk Museum and more, many of which are being shown together in Scotland for the first time.
The patterned cloth's significance and enduring relevance has persisted, with some of the fashion world's most iconic and daring minds making use of the fabric in their designs. Alongside their work, the exhibition will feature pieces by contemporary designers including Grace Wales Bonner, Nicholas Daley, Louise Gray, Charles Jeffrey, Owen Snaith and Olubiyi Thomas.
Juxtaposing historical and contemporary objects, the exhibition is laid out in five sections: Tartan and the Grid, Innovating Tartan, Tartan and Identity, Tartan and Power, and Transcendental Tartan.
Tartan and the Grid is about the basic structure of tartan, introduced through textiles from around the world. Innovating Tartan looks at how it has always been at the intersection of technical innovation, with the patterned fabric covering every imaginable surface.
In Tartan and Identity, tartan’s global fascination is examined, as well as the appeal it always held for those who express themselves through their clothing, from the traditional to the radical. Meanwhile, Tartan and Power shows how it disrupts and conforms and is used to push boundaries or maintain control in war and peacetime.
Finally, Transcendental Tartan transports visitors to new worlds and possibilities in fashion, media, performance and popular culture. The exhibition will look at tartan’s many narratives and how it is used by designers as a medium for myth and storytelling.
In addition, V&A Dundee has asked the public to contribute to the exhibition. This will be through The People’s Tartan, an eclectic selection of objects and memories that will spark recognition and nostalgia.
To commemorate the landmark exhibition, the V&A has commissioned Kinloch Anderson to design a new tartan to be used as the museum's exclusive tartan and developed a range of merchandise in collaboration with designers in Scotland.
V&A Dundee Director Leonie Bell said: "To mark our fifth birthday we are celebrating and challenging the history and contradictions within Scotland’s most iconic design.
"Everyone knows tartan, in Scotland and across the world, and it is linked to a hugely diverse range of identities. It is at once the pattern of Highland myth and legend, forever entwined with Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite uprising, as well as being the pattern of 1970s punks and contemporary Japanese fashion influencers.
"Tartan lives in the worlds of high fashion and tourism souvenirs, military uniform and palaces, football stadiums and concerts. It is adored and derided, has inspired great works of art and design, and somehow can represent unity and dissent, tradition and rebellion, the past, the present and the future.
"Tartan – the instantly recognisable symbol of Scotland, a global textile of oppression, rebellion, and fashion, is major and must-see show for 2023."
Consultant curator Professor Jonathan Faiers added: "The diversity that this exhibition encompasses is an indication of the significant position that tartan occupies as a visual representation of historical, political and economic shifts within society. Marked by wars and revolutions, modified by migrations and prohibitions, tartan is uniquely positioned to act as a reminder of the past whilst clothing the present.
"As tartan so richly demonstrates, textiles, from the smallest details of their pattern and construction to their global dissemination, provide rules to be disrupted with which we can understand historical transformations within society and developments in our own time. The intersections and spaces between warp and weft provide a textile template for the collisions, coincidences and ruptures that punctuate society."
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