V&A Dundee prepares for tartan show

THE Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in Dundee wanted to see your tartan – and you didn’t let them down.

Last year, Scotland’s design museum sent out a plea for Scots to search their wardrobes for examples of forgotten fashions featuring our national dress.

Now, the museum is preparing to open “Tartan”, an exhibition that will take “a radical new look at an instantly recognisable textile and pattern”.

The show is due to open on 1 April and run until next January.

More than 80 people and organisations from around the world have lent the museum more than 300 items for the exhibition.

The show features designs by Chanel, Dior, Alexander McQueen, and Vivienne Westwood.

Works by contemporary designers including Grace Wales Bonner, Nicholas Daley, Louise Gray, Charles Jeffrey, Owen Snaith, and Olubiyi Thomas will also be on display.

Leonie Bell, the V&A Dundee’s director, 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.”

She added: “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.”

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