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The bogosity of clan tartans has been documented since at least 1940; see the footnotes in the chapter on Highland culture in Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Inventio

• hirundo 7y ago
  > since at least 1940 According to the article, since The Glasgow Herald article in 1895. It turns out that Father Christmas isn't real either, but some things people really don't want to interrogate.
  • aoki 7y ago
    The chapter in The Invention of Tradition (there are PDFs of the book online if you're interested in the topic) is about the efforts by Scottish nationalists over the century prior to the Allens to establish the idea of kilts and clan tartans (and efforts by historians against these ideas - the author of the chapter points to a 1940 book by McClintock as making the case "conclusively"). Clan tartans were not, as represented in the article, "all made up in 1829 by two brothers from Surrey" - the Allens were popularizers, not the origin of the idea. I mention this because I think that the whole idea of political "invention of tradition," while it has lost currency because it seems to reflect poorly on anti-colonial nationalist movements, is far more interesting than that of "random people making up stories for gain."