Shiona Chillas, Melinda Grewar, Barbara Townley

The Enterprise of Culture
School of Management
University of St Andrews

Barbara Townley is Professor of Management at the School of Management, University of St Andrews.  She has taught at the Universities of Lancaster, Warwick, Alberta, Canada, and Edinburgh and has published widely in journals in management and organization in Europe and North America. She holds a number of ESRC, AHRC and RCUK grants and with colleagues, she is researching into the role of IP in creative SMEs and micro organizations; the role of design in fledgling business start-ups; and strategies of distinction in the Scottish fashion and textile industry.

Dr Shiona Chillas is Lecturer in Management in the School of Management, University of St Andrews. Her research interests are in skills acquisition and deployment and the creative industries. Based in the Institute for Capitalising on Creativity, she is project member on the Enterprise of Culture project with Barbara Townley (PI) and Mindy Grewar. She has published in Organization, Employee Relations and New Technology, Work and Employment.

Mindy Grewar is a HERA Research Assistant and PhD student at the School of Management, University of St Andrews. Her doctoral research considers the practice of audience reviewing and taste judgements within social media applications. Prior to her academic career, Mindy worked in Local Authority arts and craft development in Scotland and New Zealand, and in journalism and educational publishing in the United States.

Abstract

Making heritage fashion: Scottish tartan and tweed

Tartan and tweed are suffused with historic and cultural references such as the ‘wild’ Scottish landscape that inspires colourways, traditional uses of tartan in Highland dress, and in tweed the associations with social class and sporting pursuits. These references, built up over generations and thriving on notions of authenticity and tradition, reach into the past to give meanings to the cloths. Heritage refers to history but does not say much about how history is used and understood in contemporary practice. This talk explores the ways in which versions of the past inform contemporary understandings of tartan and tweed. It identifies how national, archival and embodied histories are used selectively as resources in producing and marketing the fabrics, creating symbolic associations with provenance, purity and luxury. In their use, it is not the actual history that counts, but rather in its being widely accepted and uncontested.