Scotland is among the most easily branded of all European countries, having for 250 years or more been strongly identified under three criteria: landscape, bagpipes and tartan. The last of these has been the most visible, the most exportable and the most controversial.

In the late medieval and early modern periods, writers like John of Fordoun and Hector Boece had brought forward the idea that the true and most patriotic Scots were to be found in the north of Scotland. From the 15th century, Tacitus’s Agricola reinforced the idea of the northern Scots, the Caledonians north of Forth-Clyde, being the defenders of poverty and purity against empire and corruption. Tartan became a visible sign of the patriot Scot and a marker of Scottish military and noble pursuits; King James V ordered a hunting suit of tartan in 1538. The participation of the Gaelic-descended population of Scotland in the wars of the 1640s may have led to tartan being identified as the Stuart loyalist cloth, and it began to appear as a marker of Scottishness in London visual culture by the 1670s. Moreover, as is shown by the paintings of 1684-86 in Edinburgh’s Holyroodhouse and the creation of national institutions in Scotland in the 1670s and 1680s, the later Stuarts were intent on promoting a sense of identity between their dynasty and the nationality of Scotland.

After the ousting of the Stuart dynasty, tartan began to be used as a uniform for those who would not customarily have worn it, to evince loyalty to Scotland and the Stuart line. A particular Jacobite sett of tartan appeared in Edinburgh shortly after the 1707 Union, and scarves and other accessories were produced. In 1715 and particularly in 1745, almost the entire Jacobite army was clothed in tartan. In the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising of 1745, tartan was initially banned, except in the British Army, whence its rehabilitation began as a military cloth worn by the glamorous Highland Regiments. In the early 19th century, tartan began to be presented as a strict dress code, reserved for certain families or “clans”. The right to wear a certain tartan became a matter of inheritance, “blood” or membership of a particular family.

In 1782, the proscription of 1746 was reversed, and by the end of that decade the Highland Society of London was linking Highland dress to its own notions of prestige and formality. Chiefs of the Name adopted the (formerly demotic) plaid as a sign of Scottish distinctiveness, and indeed exclusiveness. Tartan became more regimented, and by 1815 the Society had begun to make a register of tartans worn by clan chiefs. The weaving company Wilsons of Bannockburn, who had been producing family tartans since the 1790s, produced a pattern book in 1819. Further systematizations followed, galvanized by George IV’s 1822 visit to Edinburgh, stage-managed by Walter Scott; Scott suggested that Highland gear be worn at court presentations and at the “Highland Ball”. In 1822, Alasdair MacDonnell’s Society of True Highlanders laid stress on formal dress: one of their members wrote a guide to the use of tartan for “Chieftains and Men of Unquestionable Family”. This intensification of formality effectively served to circumscribe a distinctive Scottish identity within the British Empire. The apogee of the cloth’s codification came in the works of the Sobieski Stuarts, neo-Jacobite impostors who claimed descent from Prince Charles Edward Stuart and who produced Vestiarium Scoticum (1842, purporting to be the edition of a 15th-century manuscript) and The costume of the clans (1845), much of which was contrived. However, like James Logan’s earlier The Scottish Gael, or Celtic manners as preserved among the Highlanders (1831), these publications met a market need. Tartan was now a kind of inferior coat of arms: the authentic marker of Scottish family. As such, it served both as the dominant iconography of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort’s redecoration of Balmoral in the 1850s and as the marker of Scottish troops in the British Empire, whose kilted garb both proclaimed their warrior heritage and visibly presented them as an assimilated version of the native peoples they were seeking to subdue.

At the same time, tartan had a more promiscuous use in a carnivalesque guise. Beginning with the portrayal of Charles Edward Stuart in harlequin tartan in a famous image from the 1750s, the association of the cloth with Scottish patriotism and rebellion became softened into a pastiche use of tartanry in plays, the music hall and elsewhere. This tartan harlequinade was continued as an ironic postmodern adaptation in popular culture from the 1970s onwards; resistance to tartan as a “Scotch Myth” has given way to a recognition of its importance to many diverse forms of Scottish self-representation.

In the contemporary era, the serious and the ironic registers have fused. Tartan has become almost de rigueur at Scottish formal occasions, no longer primarily as a marker of family, but rather of identity, while the “Tartan Army” of Scottish football supporters visually manifest both their support for the national team and their acknowledgement of the likelihood of its defeat. Tartanry today remains a marker of Scottishness, but one made complex by a long history of national resistance, the British imperial project and the stereotypical application of it to the comic Scotsman.