Quote Originally Posted by OC Richard View Post
I'm not saying that commemorative tartans don't exist, or that people nowadays aren't putting specific colours in their designs due to non-aesthetic reasons.

Nor am I disparaging any of that stuff.

I'm just saying that these things are alien to the original/traditional aesthetics of tartan design.
And THAT, of course, begs the question of just what DID qualify as "original" or "traditional."

Long before Wilson's, and probably long before some brown, yellow, and red cloth got buried in a peat bog near Loch Ness, guys whose day jobs meant spending their nights out in the fields keeping warm by lying down next to their wooly charges ostensibly wore predecessors of what we now call tartan, and I think it's safe to say that while much of that VERY early history is highly conjectural, it's safe to say that their spouses who made those multi-purpose garments didn't worry about thread counts or sett size or even just HOW carefully their guys might fold up their blankets and then lie down on the grass so that when they got up ready to walk with their weapons at the ready all the folds they'd made to cover their behinds would line up in some attractive pattern.

So, an evolution to a point where "tartan" evolved TO some connection with family or some other affinity group isn't wrenched into totally foreign or unwelcome territory just because someone producing it came up with the notion of making its colors "mean" something.