exhibition

V&A Dundee to present the first major exhibition in Scotland in 30 years to focus solely on tartan

Tartan (1 April 2023 – 14 January 2024) at V&A Dundee takes a radical new look at an instantly recognisable textile and pattern.

Set to be a major event in 2023’s cultural calendar, Tartan marks the 5^th anniversary of Scotland’s design museum.

Celebrating tartan and its global impact, the exhibition explores how tartan has connected and divided communities worldwide, how it has embraced tradition, expressed revolt, and inspired great works of art as well as playful and provocative designs.

Tartan at V&A Dundee brings together a dazzling selection of more than 300 objects from over 80 lenders worldwide, illustrating 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 features 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.

Tartan’s importance and enduring appeal as a textile has been utilised by designers throughout history, with some of fashion’s most innovative and rebellious minds exercising their refined cutting skills on tartan as a fabric. This will be reflected with pieces by Chanel, Dior, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood and Comme des Garçons, alongside the work of contemporary designers inspired by tartan including Grace Wales Bonner, Nicholas Daley, Louise Gray, Charles Jeffrey, Owen Snaith and Olubiyi Thomas.

The exhibition takes a radical new look at tartan, juxtaposing historical objects with the contemporary and is laid out in five sections where visitors can immerse themselves in the world of Tartan.

Tartan and the Grid looks at the basic structure of tartan, introduced through textiles from around the world and positioning Tartan as a set of rules to be disrupted by designers.

Innovating Tartan looks at how tartan has always been at the intersection of technical innovation. Tartan has been translated into a pattern manifested in an incredible variety of materials, from natural to the synthetic, and even glass. It covers every imaginable surface, securing its position at the forefront of art and design.

In Tartan and Identity, tartan’s global fascination including its importance to diasporic communities is examined. Also, the appeal tartan has always held for those who express themselves through their clothing, from the traditional to the radical.

Tartan and Power shows how it disrupts and conforms. A force of pride and might, used to push boundaries or maintain control in war and peacetime.

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 The People’s Tartan, an eclectic selection of objects and memories that will spark recognition and nostalgia.

To commemorate this landmark exhibition, V&A Dundee 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.

The spectrum of how tartan has been worn is covered in the exhibition, from an eighteenth-century tartan dress coat for the Ancient Caledonian Society, to a significant photograph from around 1908 of Scottish Suffragettes proudly wearing tartan sashes. From Sir Jackie Stewart’s racing helmet with its distinctive Royal Stewart tartan band, through to contemporary streetwear from Japan.

Tartan includes objects that illustrate the global translation, appropriation, reach and appeal of tartan across cultures and borders. The indigenous textiles of Indian Madras and East African Shuka cloth are explored in relation to tartan in the exhibition. Global, diasporic and even out of this world connections are represented too, with an ensemble made from Canadian Maple Leaf tartan and a fragment of MacBean tartan taken aboard Apollo 12 in November 1969 by American astronaut Alan Bean.

Paintings, including Donald Judd’s minimalist grids, Christian Hook’s oil painting of actor Alan Cumming and Gerard Burns’ portrait of the late former Scotland International rugby star Doddie Weir OBE, sit alongside the seventeenth-century image of Lord Mungo Murray by John Michael Wright.

There are items of devotion, from a fragment of tartan worn by Prince Charles Edward Stuart, now afforded relic status, to Bay City Rollers trousers, handmade by a lifelong fan.

From the sublime through to the everyday - even the humble but iconic tartan shortbread tin has been considered.

Leonie Bell, V&A Dundee Director, says:

"To mark our 5th 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, says:

“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.”

Mhairi Maxwell, Curator at V&A Dundee, says:

“Tartan is a design which offers a set of rules to be disrupted. The sett, warp, weft and pivot are what makes tartan’s grid instantly recognisable, even the smallest fragment. But these rules are open to infinite possibility, as experimented with by designers in fashion, technology, architecture, and many other disciplines.

“Tartan has been misunderstood. Tartan has inspired designers, artists and its consumers a world away from parochial pastiche.

It is a global phenomenon, expressing diverse ideas of belonging, kinship, nationalism, unity and resistance.”

Kirsty Hassard, Curator at V&A Dundee, says:

“Tartan has been constantly reinvented and that is incredibly important to the narrative of the exhibition. It’s a pattern and textile that stretches back thousands of years, and some of the stories the exhibition tells are 300 years old or more, but Tartan isn’t a retrospective, it is absolutely a contemporary show.

“With in excess of 300 objects from more than 80 lenders around the globe, Tartan tells the story of how this pattern has travelled and explores the connection we all have to it.”

Entry to the exhibition is free for members and 18s and under.

Tickets are now on sale at www.vam.ac.uk/dundee/exhibtions/tartan

@VADundee #VADTartan

V&A Dundee will reopen on Thursday 27 August with its first major fashion exhibition, Mary Quant, and an exciting new programme extending throughout the whole museum. 

Mary Quant is the first international retrospective on the iconic British designer who disrupted the fashion establishment, captured the spirit of London in the 1960s, and started a fashion revolution that a whole generation wanted to take part in – and still continues today. 

The exhibition will run from 27 August to 17 January 2021, with tickets on sale from today at www.vam.ac.uk/dundee This will be followed by Night Fever: Designing Club Culture from 27 March to 5 September 2021. 

Turner Prize-winning architecture collective Assemble will begin work in V&A Dundee on Making Room from 27 August, a project with Dundee Central Library, local school pupils and the museum’s Young People’s Collective.  

Making Room is taking inspiration from historic buildings in Dundee to produce a new interior room that will be built in V&A Dundee before being moved to Dundee Central Library, where it will function as an area for digital learning and making for the city. 

Scotland’s first design museum has also curated a new exhibition in response to the coronavirus pandemic, looking at how designers responded to the crisis. Now Accepting Contactless: Design in a Global Pandemic will be shown in the Michelin Design Gallery, in spaces throughout the museum and, for the first time, outside the museum as well. 

Other design projects will be shown across the museum, including Sewing Box for the Future and films from the Schools Design Challenge, as well as the reopening of the Scottish Design Galleries including Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s iconic Oak Room. 

A number of measures will be in place across the museum to ensure a safe, welcoming and inspiring experience for visitors and staff alike. All visitors will need to book free tickets to enter the museum, as part of the essential steps to keep visitors safe and to ensure physical distancing. Those free tickets can also be booked from today at www.vam.ac.uk/dundee 

Mary Quant at V&A Dundee is supported by Barclays Private Bank. Making Room and the Schools Design Challenge are both supported by players of People’s Postcode Lottery. 

Leonie Bell, incoming Director of V&A Dundee, said: “I am hugely excited to be preparing to join the team at V&A Dundee, particularly at a time when Scotland’s first design museum will be reopening and welcoming visitors back with Mary Quant, its first major fashion exhibition, and its most ambitious programme to date.  

“That programme also includes the brilliant architecture collective Assemble working with young people in Dundee and an exploration of how designers responded to the pandemic, underlining the importance of design to everyone’s lives.” 

Sophie McKinlay, Director of Programme at V&A Dundee, said: “Everyone at V&A Dundee is delighted to be preparing our remarkable museum to reopen once again, and we have all been working hard to welcome visitors back for a safe, enjoyable experience. 

“Mary Quant is a remarkable designer who did so much to revolutionise the fashion industry and to empower women to wear clothes that looked great and felt great, and it’s the perfect choice for our first major fashion exhibition. 

“Across the rest of the museum visitors will see more than they’ve ever seen before, with displays inside and outside the museum that explore creative responses to how the world has changed and how we hope it may change in the future.” 

Dundee City Council leader John Alexander said: “The reopening of V&A Dundee will be yet another important milestone in the city’s journey out of lockdown. 

“I am pleased that the Assemble partnership with Central Library will see local young people given the opportunity to get involved in an exciting design project that reaches out into the community. 

“I also hope that our local economy and businesses will be given a boost by visitors who come to the city because of the tremendous attractions of V&A Dundee and its Mary Quant exhibition.” 

Mary Quant designed clothes that made people feel good. She made quality designer fashion affordable through licensing her youthful and playful brand, creating dressmaking patterns, make-up and accessories that all showcased her iconic daisy logo. 

Mary Quant encouraged a new age of feminism, inspiring young women to rebel against the traditional clothing worn by their mothers and grandmothers. Her shop Bazaar opened in 1955, the year after World War Two food rationing ended, and her colourful designs were a reaction against the austerity and drabness of post-war London. 

Mary Quant is famous for popularising the miniskirt, but her designs offered many different versions of femininity and challenged the conventional gender stereotypes of post-war Britain. 

Key objects featured within the exhibition include the pioneering ‘Wet Collection’ PVC rainwear, a jute miniskirt, and designs that playfully subverted menswear at a time when women were still banned from wearing trousers in formal settings such as restaurants. 

The exhibition in Dundee will also feature the stories of women who made outfits from Mary Quant’s dressmaking patterns, gathered through V&A Dundee’s #SewQuant campaign, as well as a new film looking at contemporary female designers who, like Mary Quant, are forging their own way through today’s rapidly shifting fashion industry. 

Mary Quant was curated by Jenny Lister and Stephanie Wood of the V&A and shown at V&A South Kensington from 6 April 2019 to 16 February 2020.  

#QuantDundee  

#welcomeback

Image:  © PA Prints 2008