NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {T} here’s something about tartan. Bedecked in this symbol-rich, gridded cloth were not only fact-or-fiction Scots such as Macbeth, William Wallace, and Flora MacDonald. To make a point, and the points seem as limitless as the tartan palette, punks in the ’80s wore it. So did King George IV, Idi Amin, the good people of Brigadoon, and Rosemary, mother of that famous demon baby. Vivienne Westwood made tartan a fashion must for the edgy, as did Queen Victoria for the warm-and-fuzzy.

Parliament’s Dress Act of 1746 mostly banned it as insurrectionist. The Battle of Culloden made Scottish iconography a crime against the new United Kingdom. Some years later, the last photograph of Elizabeth II shows her in a tartan skirt, bidding “fareweel tae Tarwathie” to one prime minister and anointing another who didn’t have enough time in office to buy a tartan tea tin in the Balmoral shop.

Here, we call it plaid, and plaid’s both a preppy and a working-class staple as well as a gay emblem, hence, a Village Person wore a plaid — tartan — shirt. Every clan’s got its own tartan except the Ku Klux Klan. White doesn’t figure much in tartan.

The system of clan tartan is mostly made up. Hate to tell you.

Tartan is the first retrospective of the textile that’s distinctly Scottish and also universal. I saw the show in September at the Victoria & Albert Museum’s branch in Dundee, Scotland, about an hour’s train trip from Edinburgh. It’s the Dundee museum’s fifth anniversary and the first exhibition its curators have organized.

With about 300 objects and covering 300 or so years, it’s an expansive, delightful, and provocative exhibition. It covers fashion, product design, film, performance, and high art. It’s simultaneously very Scottish and very international, but its utter Scottishness wins the day.

Tartan starts with the grid. Tartan’s intersecting grips, whether simple, repeated checks or complex asymmetrical patterns, are organized on the basis of a small number of colors that blend and change as grids overlap. Bright red, deep green, blue, and black make nearly all tartan palettes. A “sett” is the entirety of the pattern.

I would have done Tartan chronologically, starting with the last stand of the Stuarts at Culloden in 1746, but I think the museum did it right. Tartan, viewed by the victorious English as seditious, was banned for civilian attire and reserved for Scottish regiments under the command of London. The Dress Act was repealed in 1782, but it wasn’t until George IV’s visit to Scotland in 1822 that tartan went mass-market. George IV was the first monarch to visit Scotland since 1651, when Charles II was crowned king of Scotland, though England was still ruled by Cromwell.

George’s extravagant, three-week visit, stage-managed by Walter Scott, was tartan aplenty, everywhere in the city. George, though by this time fat and gouty, famously wore a kilt with all the fixin’s and looked like a Highland chief. His grand portrait by David Wilkie isn’t in the exhibition, and I know why. It’s big, takes the air out of everything, and why honor an English king, and one who’s actually German.

The Dundee museum is high on design, not history. It’s the Scottish home of the V&A, a museum dedicated to design. Tartan’s Scottish and universal, the show’s curators correctly believe, but let’s keep the English out of it as much as we can. So after we learn about warp, weft, and grids, we jump to the use of tartan by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) and Donald Judd (1928–1994), and a punk tartan ensemble designed by the contemporary Scottish — though London-based — designer Louise Gray.

Tartan doesn’t exactly proclaim “history’s for geezers,” but it’s a design museum that appeals to a young crowd, and that’s good. Dundee’s a university city. Today, design is among Scotland’s calling cards, with tartan as the ultimate Scottish look.

There are, we learn, more than 11,000 tartan patterns. Starting around 1800, textile makers, fashionistas, and historians have labored obsessively to classify these patterns. While much ink has been spilled and many harsh words exchanged over the ancient clan lineage of patterns, 20th-century study shows that these lines — and traditions — were mostly invented to reflect Romantic-era ideals of Highland chiefdom and clanship. I liked this section a lot, though it’s a slog. Pattern books kept by makers, whether single-weaver shops or factories, initially identified designs by number. Some were classified by region.

The Vestiarium Scoticum, the most controversial book on tartan, was published in 1842 by a pair of Allen brothers — no relation — who claimed they’d found medieval manuscripts identifying tartans with clans. They claimed to be descendants of Bonnie Prince Charlie, or Charles Edward Stuart, the last Stuart pretender to the British throne. One of the manuscripts, now seen as a fake, and a kilt belonging to the brothers are on view.

We now know that William Wilson & Son, the Bannockburn company that cornered much of the market for high-end tartan in the 19th century, worked closely with clients to design new patterns, naming them in consultation with the buyers and often picking names drawn from Walter Scott novels.

Scattered throughout Tartan are vignettes called “People’s Tartan.” These display objects sent by average people in response to a museum call for tartan stories. The Scots consider themselves an egalitarian people as opposed to the class-obsessed English, so this makes sense, and some of the objects are charming.

A woman sent her late father-in-law’s miniature tartan bonnet purchased at the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow. There’s a tartan shopping bag purchased in Hong Kong, a tartan necktie from 2014 in a bespoke pattern the lender claims is the first Jewish tartan, and a pair of tartan culottes from the 1970s designed for the rock band the Bay City Rollers, lent by a woman from Dundee who got them when she was a teen.

All these vignettes are sweet but also a distraction, mixed in as they are with displays of Coco Chanel tartans, Japanese tartans, and a section on the Madras check’s debt to tartan.

The topic of tartan and sexuality is essential and treated at more than one point in Tartan. Notions of kilted, rugged masculinity started in the Romantic era with Scott’s 1817 novel, Rob Roy, and continuing to Braveheart, the 1995 Mel Gibson blockbuster. A section called “What’s Under the Kilt” treats what I have to say is in everyone’s mind when my husband wears his kilt, as he sometimes does to weddings and fancy parties. There’s an “Up Yer Kilt” bumper sticker, a tartan kilt thong, tartan condom wrappers, and tartan underwear belonging to John Brown, Queen Victoria’s Balmoral-based servant.

Traditionally, kilted Scottish regiments went commando but the British military banned kilts in combat during World War II. The old Scottish salute to the enemy on the battlefield was a mass mooning. George Lazenby’s James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, from 1969, wears a Black Watch tartan kilt, and what’s not underneath augments his allure. Tartan doesn’t dish too much, but I think most men don dark shorts. Dundee might call itself the sunniest city in Scotland, but there’s a wee nip in the air most of the time in the Highlands.

The exhibition describes tartan as “a powerful and assertive textile that can push and pull at the establishment,” and this is really the mince and tatties of the show. Tartan was staple wear among Jacobite rebels, and though uniformity of patterns was a goal, Highland fighters mostly wore their local homespun. By the mid 1700s, when Scottish regiments wore tartan kilts, patterns were uniform for each regiment. Tartan school uniforms are still common today to build cohesion and group pride.

Some pushed this to the realm of parody, and not by intention. The Ugandan despot Idi Amin kitted out his army in Royal Stewart tartan. There’s a photograph of Amin in his regalia, and an actual in-the-flesh display of the Royal Company of Archers splendid official uniform from 1750. In men’s fashion, kiltless tartan went mainstream in the 1920s when the Prince of Wales — the future Edward VIII — and the Duke of Windsor wore suits in subtle tartan wool.

We learned earlier about tartan women’s wear by Chanel, much loved by the Duchess of Windsor, but tartan dresses by designers Vivienne Westwood and punk-rock impresario Malcolm McLaren drew from the material’s early links to rebellion. In the early ’80s, Westwood’s Seditionaries boutique in London sold and later licensed tartan bondage trousers and bomber jackets.

Later, Alexander McQueen’s Highland Rape collection, in 1995, and Widows of Culloden collections, in 2006, were explicitly political. McQueen’s father was Scottish, though McQueen was born and raised in London. On view are two dresses and a sleeveless top evoking English brutality to the Highlanders in suppressing Scottish rebellion and then ruling Scotland with an exploitative, harsh hand. Not what anyone would wear to the senior prom, but these lines got people talking and coincided with the rise of the Scottish independence movement. In 2019, Dior emblazoned tartan dresses with feminist slogans. Then there’s the tartan suit designed by Liquorice Black. Tartan can’t get more attitude.

I initially thought a section called “Balmoralisation,” coming after Westwood and McQueen, was too jarring a juxtaposition, but it works. Starting in 1848, Queen Victoria made the sprawling Balmoral estate in Aberdeenshire, not far from Dundee, her summer residence.

The castle, built in the 1850s with Prince Albert’s deep engagement, looks very German and ersatz Scottish baronial, but Victoria’s time there launched a bourgeois fancy for tartan far removed from McQueen’s take 150 years later. Carpets, chairs, and sofas were tartan, as were servant uniforms and the daily royal attire. Victoria wrote that Balmoral helped her “forget the world and its sad turmoils,” as surely it did as well for Queen Elizabeth II during her 70 years as Balmoral’s mistress. Tartan came to signify escape from the outside world, warmth, well-being, and tradition.

Tartan launches from Balmoral to the theme of transcendence. It’s a heartening conclusion. There’s a fairy-tale feel to tartan. It evokes Scotland’s immense, sublime landscape but also immerses us in folklore. Peter Pan doesn’t wear tartan but J. M. Barrie was indeed Scottish. Though Scottish immigration to America was immense and the Scottish Enlightenment was as essential to us as the English common law tradition, Scotland has an otherness to it.

I would have done more with Brigadoon, the 1947 Broadway musical and 1954 movie, but it’s in the exhibition along with tartan-heavy travel porters, a clip of the dream sequence in I Know Where I’m Going, the enchanting Powell and Pressburger movie from 1945, and a tartan banner flown on the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission.

Last week, I read about a new tartan created by artificial intelligence. It’s heavy on yellow, not an intuitive tartan color, and I’m not sure this reassures or unsettles me. AI’s tartan doesn’t quite go off the rails but comes close.

I loved Tartan and like the Dundee museum and Dundee a lot. The museum building, which opened five years ago, is handsome, stunningly so. The place works as a design think tank, art space, and living room for the city. Blessedly, there’s no cant on the Scottish independence movement. I wish Tartan had done more with the use of plaid in America, but the curators may’ve felt that America would gobble the story. Half the signers of the Declaration of Independence and three-quarters of American presidents had Scottish blood.

Donald Trump’s mother was from the Isle of Lewis. Barack Obama is part Scots-Irish, though he goofed by calling Scotland “the Emerald Isles” while speaking at a climate confab in Glasgow.

There’s no catalogue specific to the exhibition, but its scholarly basis and catalogue as a practical matter is Jonathan Faiers’s Tartan, a history first published in 2008 but updated last year. The book’s a rich dish of haggis, which means I like it, with many features that didn’t make it into the exhibition, though that’s understandable. It’s more chronological and starts with George IV’s tartan-heavy visit to Scotland in 1822, but it’s a history text and not an art show.

I did miss some of its juicy bits from a chapter called “Tartan Toffs.” The exhibition isn’t a flat art show, but I’d love to have seen Pompeo Batoni’s Portrait of William Gordon of Fyvie, from 1765, a Grand Tour picture in which the subject wears tartan as a Roman emperor would wear his toga.

Faiers’s book is great. At points it addresses the popularization of tartan in the 19th century via the British royal family. Does that make tartan a colonial enterprise?

The exhibition avoids the discussion. The Sex Pistols don’t make the cut, and the book considers in detail the Japanese tartan craze as well as a French mania for all things Scottish, haggis excepted, after the Battle of Waterloo. I learned that Marilyn Monroe’s famous turn over a subway vent in The Seven Year Itch is based on a 1927 Laurel and Hardy movie where Stan Laurel, wearing a kilt, does the same and makes the ladies swoon.

In Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary wears a tartan skirt when she first meets her demonic next-door neighbor. She lines her kitchen cabinets with tartan paper. The cabinets are by the secret entrance to the room where Satan’s fan club meets. Tartan, I learned, has protective powers in folklore that, alas, may not work as advertised.

Tartan is a wonderful fifth-anniversary show for Dundee. The museum is very close to the train station and is already a well-earned destination for visitors to Scotland.