The clothing that defines Scotland—plaid, kilts, cashmere, tweeds—has somehow managed to attain a status as mythic as the Loch Ness Monster while also being undoubtedly real. (Is Nessie real? I’d love to think so—the four-year-old me certainly did.) What fashion has found so alluring for so many years had prosaic beginnings—you know, to keep dry, and to keep warm, which, when it comes to the Scottish climate, is all you ever really need worry about.
That said, when those four elemental forces are channeled by designers, magic happens. You only need to look at the Caledonia fantasia that Grace Coddington and Arthur Elgort dreamt up with Linda Evangelista forVoguein 1991: Hijinks and high kicks in plaids, plaids, and yet more plaids in the Scottish Highlands—and all with a backdrop of baronial palaces and the skirl of bagpipes.
Meanwhile, last summer, while on a trip back to my ancestral homeland, I visited the V&A Museum in Dundee and saw itsTartanshow, which was fantastic. The show spanned everything from a 1930s Patou evening bias-cut dress (I texted it to the current designer of the house, Guillaume Henry), to Bonnie Prince Charlie-goes-Chanel from Karl Lagerfeld, and the forever appeal of Vivienne Westwood’s punkish two-fingers-up interpretation of bondage trousers andAnarchy in the UKmuslin tees.
Also in that show was a tee and full plaid skirt from Maria Grazia Chiuri’s debut for Dior. I happened to see Chiuri in Edinburgh this past Sunday, and she told me she’d loved thatTartanshow too, as well as architect Kengo Kuma’s incredible boat-like building that houses the museum. She also told me plenty else that enthralled her about Scotland, but for that you’ll have to look at her Dior show, which she held at Drummond Castle in Perthshire on Monday evening. |
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June 9, 1893—Cole Porter was born in Peru, Indiana. The great songwriter’s first Broadway play, co-written with T. Lawrason Riggs was reviewed inVoguein 1916 thusly: “See America Firstlost money in the theatre, but the authors may be consoled by a sentence of Sir Philip Sidney’s, ‘It is well to shoot our arrows at the moon, for though they may miss their mark, they will yet fly higher than if we had flung them into a bush.’” |
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