Thoroughly modern tweed
Alan Taylor, AW13
Once worn only by Miss Marple types, traditional tweed is being imaginatively reinvented by a fresh crop of fashion innovators for today’s style-savvy shopper, explains Marie Kelly.
When an emerging talent with a directional aesthetic – like the Dublin-born designer Alan Taylor – is championing tweed, the die is most definitely cast – tweed is no longer twee. In fact tweed is now trendy, and it’s turning even the most stylish of heads, from haute couture to high street.
London-based Taylor’s fledgling menswear label set fashion tongues wagging at last season’s MAN initiative – part of the London Collections: Men enterprise, designed to encourage and support young design talent. A cool and very covetable asymmetric Donegal tweed coat opened, and stole, his autumn/winter show. The 24-year-old NCAD graduate is rapturous about the yarns he sources from the fourth generation, Irish manufacturer Magee, earnestly describing the company’s cloths as “incredible”. His enthusiasm for the history and craftsmanship of this traditional textile is reflective of a global attitude that’s putting tweed very firmly back on the fashion map.
Origin myths, founding fathers and legacy tales – all the things that once made tweed seem a little trite – are playing an enormous part in the cloth’s current reinvention. In the past five years luxury brands have seized on the values of tradition and authenticity to market their wares. Today it is considered cool to have an interest in craftsmanship and well-made things. The Hermès Festival of Metiers, a travelling exhibition of artisans that showcases the mastery behind the iconic label’s screen-printed silk scarfs, was visited by more than 40,000 people in the first week of its residence at London’s Saatchi Gallery last May. In 2011 The New York Times reported that the traditional wristwatch, declared by a 2005 article in The Boston Globe to be “an obsolete artefact” was experiencing a buoyant surge in popularity among “the lost generation” raised on Game Boys and ever-shrinking LCD screens. And the appeal of the timepiece was that it had endured for decades – in other words, it had a past.
Designers are now injecting tweed with a very atypical urban character
All of a sudden the rather tired old tale of Irish tweed is generating a kind of giddy excitement among today’s fashion innovators who are seeking more authentic brand values. Stylists, buyers and designers are almost childishly effusive about the techniques and textures associated with this homemade textile. Designer Ruth MacGowan of Irish fashion label Gonne Wilde passionately describes the hand-loomed tweeds she uses as “nutty and almost flavoursome in texture”. Meanwhile, iconic fashion house Chanel has reinvented its signature fabric once more for the current season – this is tweed, but not as we know it. These woven wonders shone with intricate metallic threads and wowed with the sophistication and elegance of their silhouettes. And at Chloé, any old-lady associations were banished by utilitarian buckles and exposed zips. Lanvin, Dries Van Noten and Haider Ackermann defied expectation by draping this traditionally masculine fabric like silk for a sexy but still uncompromising silhouette.
Intriguing as Chanel’s new spin on an old favourite may be, it’s the reimagining of this heritage fabric by young and left-field designers that is now capturing the imagination of consumers. These designers are injecting tweed with a very atypical urban character, which appeals to a youth culture that is perhaps less interested in what Karl Lagerfeld does and more inclined to take notice of what rapper-cum- fashion designer Tinie Tempah wears – the artist was photographed in a tweed suit at a fashion show in Milan earlier this year – or indeed David Beckham, who was spotted in London back in January sporting a tweed “cabbie hat”. And this aesthetic is being mirrored on the high street. British retailer Jigsaw, for instance, showcased tweed T-shirts in novel shades of neon as part of its spring/summer collection (pictured left). Last year cool urban brand Converse (the third most popular brand on Facebook in 2012 after Walt Disney and Starbucks, with 20.9 million Likes) teamed up with the Scottish Western Isles’ cloth company Harris Tweed Hebrides to create a limited-edition Harris Tweed Chuck Taylor All Star trainer (pictured top left) for the brand’s Japanese market. Meanwhile preppy American label J Crew and high-street giant Topman are both featuring tweed heavily this season.
This hardwearing, durable material has had a rather chequered past in this country, however, falling out of the nation’s favour in the 1990s and noughties when it struggled to overcome its traditional associations with geriatrics and geography teachers. Despite supplying some of the biggest international fashion houses with the highest quality yarns – among them heavyweights such as Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan – Irish tweed manufacturers suffered from the curse of being considered uncool at a time when consumers coveted the credibility of big-brand, luxury labels. But according to the world-renowned trend-spotter Marian Salzman, “We are going to spend more time thinking about what it means to buy something, and we’re much more engaged about what our clothing says as our signature.” Fashion today is becoming much less about trends and more about integrity.
Certainly there is an almost mystical quality to this beautiful cloth. As Irish Times fashion editor Deirdre McQuillan so succinctly put it, tweed “has weave magic!” She reminds me of artist Breon O’Casey’s remark that wearing tweed made him feel like he was wearing the landscape. Many of us feel that there’s a symbiotic relationship between the cloth and the land from whence it hails, and it’s this kind of mythology that is resonating with designers and consumers of every age. But a backstory has not been enough to save the flagging fortunes of tweed. It needed that injection of modernity, that reimagining of form and function.
If Topman and J Crew are unlikely places to shop tweed, then so too is Dublin boutique Indigo & Cloth, which was voted the “most inspiring” store in Ireland by fashion industry bible Drapers in 2011. Last year owner Garret Pitcher collaborated with Donegal weavers Molloy & Sons to supply a selection of limited-edition jackets and blankets for his trendy Temple Bar boutique. The jackets, made from an archive Donegal fleck tweed from the Molloy & Sons repertoire were subsequently picked up by the Japanese clothing giant Beams.
This contemporary lifestyle store, with its selection of carefully curated and understated menswear, womenswear, accessories and magazines, is a modern and minimalist space that targets a sophisticated shopper who is both trend aware and quality conscious – not the first place you’d expect to find an old-fashioned yarn. Pitcher, who bought one of the tweed jackets himself, explains that his customers, who are a mix of creatives and professionals, are now demanding an Irish presence among the store’s handpicked international labels. “Customers want to see Irish products on our shelves, but only those of a certain grade and quality,” Pitcher explains. “Tweed is a terrific fabric with a multi-generational history. And with new design innovations yielding mixed yarns with lighter weights, it could have far more longevity within the fashion industry,” he adds.
These innovations in textile design have certainly helped to banish tweed’s traditionally itchy, scratchy image. In Taylor’s spring/summer collection, for instance, he used a cloth made from a silk yarn but woven using a classic tweed technique. The result is a lighter and more breathable end product.
Today there is a weave and style of tweed to suit every consumer. Deirdre McQuillan admits that she is quite taken by the tweed coat in Irish designer Alison Conneely’s current collection. The Connemara-born designer recently won first prize under this year’s Crafts Council of Ireland Future Makers Awards & Supports programme, and was applauded for creating “a modern design aesthetic rooted in Irish narrative, poetry and landscape.”
This eloquent sound bite sums up the spirit of Irish tweed and perhaps the very secret to its success.
This article originally appeared in The Gloss Magazine, September 2013