And the grooms wore ... personalised tartan. When Paul Burrell married his partner this week, he chose a kilt in his own officially registered tartan. It may not be the most traditional cloth the former royal butler has ever picked, but Burrell commissioned the design more than a decade ago for his personal use – and for a range of china for the US market.
Maroon, blue and gold are Burrell’s corporate colours, while two grey stripes represent his sons and a description by his former employer Diana, Princess of Wales that he was her “rock”. There are also two shades of green to commemorate his time eating grubs in the Australian outback on the reality TV show I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.
It has been possible to create your own tartan for decades. About 150 new designs are registered with the Scottish Register of Tartans each year, with celebrities, corporations and even countries picking out patterns.
Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, was an early adopter of the craze, designing the Balmoral tartan in 1853 (the Queen wears it in skirts; other members of the royal family must ask for her permission to wear it). Donald Trump had a tartan designed for his Aberdeenshire golf resort, while Madonna was given one by a Scottish tourism board on the first anniversary of her marriage to Guy Ritchie.
The creator of Burrell’s pattern, Brian Wilton, a former director of the Scottish Tartans Authority, says that while some people may want tartan to be left well alone, modern tartan creates a “visual history” that families and companies can look back on with pride. “In a world becoming much less safe and more homogenised, belonging to something gives people a sense of security, and tartan gives that. It’s reassuring.”
The oldest tartan found dates from 1200BC and was found wrapped around the leg of a mummified body – believed to be a Celtic man – in China. Traditional clan tartan, says Wilton, probably came about because local weavers sold the same pattern to everyone in the area, and its colours likely had little significance. But modern versions can tell a story. “You can design personal elements into it – either for the company or an individual,” he says. “It’s the history of tomorrow in the tartan of today.”
Wilton points to the tartan he created to commemorate the Russian Arctic convoys of the second world war. “I spoke to veterans about the colours they remembered. Their rationale was chilling – it was white for the wind-whipped wave tops, black for the lines of German bombers coming to attack them and silver for the torpedo bubbles coming towards you.”
He says amateur tartan designers can go a bit far. Conventionally, tartan includes two to six colours, with a mixture of bands and narrow highlights. But computer programs that allow people to design their own tartan are breaking this tradition. Wilton says with horror that some people have even created tartans to remember their dead pets. This, he says, is “trivialising the dignified history of tartan”.
