How many official tartans are there

Their mission is both to preserve history as well as to register newly designed tartans. This registry was formed as the official one in , merging two unofficial registries, the Scottish Tartans World Register and the Scottish Tartans Authority. There are many tartans that are designated not for a clan, as commonly thought, but also for organizations, areas of land, and even companies. In that last category are an assortment of tartans that have been registered for fictional characters.

Click on the character's name in bold to see the picture of the fabric at The Scottish Register of Tartans. Brave's DunBroch clan. K-9 from Doctor Who. This pre design's notes state that K-9's dog collar from the Tom Baker years! Rob Roy. This tartan was designed and woven specifically for the film. Colonial Marines from Aliens. Not made specifically for the film, but registered in , "Brad Majors" was an attempt to recreate the tartan in Brad's bowtie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Talk about dedication to your cosplay! Hello Kitty. In other parts of the world, tartan cloth has been found dating to approximately BC. Virtually everywhere there was woven cloth, people created tartan designs. Yet only in Scotland have they been given such cultural significance. Originally, tartan designs had no names, and no symbolic meaning.

All tartan cloth was hand woven, and usually supplied locally. While it may have been true that certain colors or pattern motifs were more common in some areas than others, no regulated or defined "clan tartan" system ever existed.

Tartan, in general, however came to be extremely popular in Scottish Highland culture. So much so that by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tartan clothing is seen to be characteristic of Highland dress. Tartan was so identified with the Highland Gael that after the Battle of Culloden in , the British government, in the Act of Proscription, forbade the wearing of tartan among other things in the Highlands, in an attempt to suppress the rebellious Scottish culture.

By the end of the eighteenth century, large scale commercial weavers had taken up the production of tartan. This firm was begun sometime around and became quite successful, being the sole supplier of tartan cloth to the Highland Regiments.

Because they were producing cloth in such large quantities, they developed standard colors and patterns early on. At first they assigned numbers to identify the patterns, but soon began to give them names. These not only included names of Highland clans, but also town names, and some fancy names to boot. The names were not meant to be representative in any way -- they were there as a sales tool, to identify one tartan pattern from another. In Wilsons' Key Pattern Book of , some tartans are included, about of which were given names.

These were not only tartans of Wilsons' designs, but patterns that they had collected from all over Scotland. In the early nineteenth century, the idea began to gel that the names borne by the tartans represented actual connections to these clans. Scots expatriates who grew up outside of the Highland line began to get interested in preserving Highland culture. It was assumed that tartans had always been named and these represented actual affiliations.

In the Highland Society of London wrote to the clan chiefs asking them to submit samples of their clan tartans. Many chiefs had no idea what "their clan tartan" was supposed to be and so either wrote to tartan suppliers such as Wilsons, or asked the older men of their clan if they recalled any particular tartan being worn. All the clan chiefs were asked to come out to greet the King in their "proper clan tartan. Many new tartans were no doubt created, or renamed for the occasion.

From this point on, however, the idea was firmly established that in order to even be a proper tartan, it had to be a named tartan. The story of the development of tartan lore over the course of the nineteenth century is long and complicated, and beyond the scope of this brief introduction.

But with the blessing of the clan chiefs, the tradition evolved by the end of the nineteenth century that tartan was representative.