Cut From Woven Cloth

I recently made a cameo appearance in a three-part BBC documentary about tweed; I was wheeled in to give a bit of historical context and to enthuse on the subject. The documentary dealt specifically with Harris tweed, a unique hirsute cloth made in Scotland's Outer Hebrides Islands. Its pretext was the changes being wrought in what is, quite literally, a cottage industry, with individual weavers working in their homes or garden sheds to make a cloth that is then returned to the mill, where it is finished and shipped all over the world. Its character owes much to an image thick with peat smoke and Gaelic, gently tinted by a thousand hues of lichen dye.

But even the most ardent tweed enthusiasts, among whom I count myself, will admit the industry has been declining since a peak of production in the late 1960s of about 7 million yards per year. It was with a view toward reviving the industry that a couple of years ago a Yorkshire textiles magnate called Brian Haggas bought the largest mill and set out to relaunch Harris tweed by making thousands of tweed jackets in a palette of colors drastically reduced from about 8,000 to four.

It was a controversial move and the BBC documentarian Ian Denyer joined the story just as Haggas, saddled with thousands of unsold tweed jackets, had to take drastic action. "I arrived at a point where Haggas had told the weavers that he was halting production until he had sold some of his jackets," says Denyer.

But it was not all bad news; Haggas's plans gave an unexpected fillip to the business of two other mills, in Shawbost and Carloway, which stepped in to fill the color vacuum. In making the film, Denyer, a tweedophile himself, was struck by the genuine worldwide enthusiasm for the fabric, and it would appear that viewers were moved, too. Since then, Haggas has sold some of his jackets and been inspired to make a fifth model, aimed at a younger customer, which even goes so far as to feature a traditional polychromatic check.

Denyer thought his series was affectionate, so he was surprised at complaints from some who felt that it portrayed the island and its cloth in an overly folkloric way, viewing Harris tweed as an almost ethnographical curiosity. But it is the ethno-specific character of Harris tweed that might well ensure its survival. With its strong innate regionality, unique manufacturing process, and romantic locus, tweed plays into the modern appetite for products that have an authentic character rather than a manufactured brand identity. A low-carbon manufacturing process—the looms used by the weavers are foot-powered—only adds to the appeal.

Like many things that have become ineffably British, tweed was largely a 19th-century invention. After the Jacobite uprising of 1745, the wearing of tartan was banned; but the later influx of affluent Victorian landowners lured north of the border by the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the joys of field sports popularized the district checks and estate tweeds that identified those who lived and worked on their acres. Hard-wearing, breathable, and executed in shades matching the landscape, tweed was the cloth from which the sportswear of the British Empire was cut.