Vestiarium Exmoorium?
Enjoying reading about the 'invention' of tartan as Scotland's national dress....
I knew of Sir Walter Scott's involvement in its 're-invention' for the King's first Scottish visit post the Jacobite rebellion (after which tartan wearing was banned for all but the military). Scott - who was a megacelebrity at the time - was given the job of organising the monarch's visit to Edinburgh. (This might be like David Beckham getting the job of organising the Queen's last Jubilee - imagine.)
Anyhow, Scott decided that mass tartan would look fabulous lining the streets and thus a trend was born, with the king apparently decked out in salmon pink trews (thats skintight trousers to you) in a bid to bond with this Scottish subjects.Hmm.
It turns out though, that Scott was more of a purist than I thought. Two brothers - the Sobieski Stuarts- predated Scott's trendsetting by publishing a copy of a spurious 'found' manuscript - the Vestiarium Scoticum. This fake supposedly verified the lineage of clan tartans, and also their own claims to the Stuart royal bloodline. The Frasers of Lovat even built them a villa on their island, Eilean Aigas, where they lived it up for quite a while in Highland style (the house and island was recently for sale BTW).
Scott publicly rebuked these claims and the veracity of the book, and though the brothers' reputations suffered, the book (and the brothers' lifelong mania for all things Scottish) remains influential on Scottish identity and culture to this day.
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