They sported Easter-egg-colored hair, stuck rows of safety pins through the straps of their backpacks, and seemed to have an endless supply of red and black plaid. At my high school, the punk rockers often showed up in plaid skirts or pants with Converse All-Stars. In a divided world, it seemed a uniting force. And if there isn’t already a space where you belong, £70 doesn’t seem that steep for a pattern you can call your own.Īs I got older, I grew to respect plaid not just for its connection to my cousins, but for its timelessness and ubiquity. It can feel amazing to belong to something. Beyond that, it’s mostly a symbolic practice-it does not trigger copyright protection, and a person cannot sue a clothing company for using their registered plaid design. It also prevents future applicants from registering the design as their own. Doing so confirms that a tartan meets the criteria outlined in the Scottish Register of Tartans Act of 2008, and it provides evidence of the creation and date of the design. To this day, Scottish tartans are recognized as family symbols, and, for a price, anyone can register their pattern with the Scottish Register of Ta rtans. With modern synthetic dyes offering infinite color permutations, a plaid pattern can be designed with extreme specificity. Dark threads dyed with regional tree bark could intersect lighter threads tinged with regional berries, creating a truly unique and local fabric. Weavers used the local vegetable dyes available to them, and in remote parts of Scotland, most residents went to the same weaver. Similar to the way my cousins might spot their classmates out and about after school by their uniforms, Scots strategically wore plaid patterns to indicate their region. Researchers have also discovered that tartans were historically used to identify one’s hometown. The earliest example was found with human remains in a desert in China, though DNA tests later confirmed the man’s Scottish heritage. Most people can vaguely identify plaid as originating from Scottish tartans, but I was surprised to find out that the pattern is over three thousand years old. At least once a week, I arrived at my public elementary school in clean, intersecting lines: my own personal uniform. With no authority figure forcing me to wear it every day, I still put it on as often as I could. If anything, it looked more grunge-inspired than school uniform-after all, it was 1995. It was a white and light blue check button-down dress with a tie waist, a cast-off from her regular wardrobe. But the closest I ever came was a hand-me-down from my oldest girl cousin. Their shirts and pants and jumpers lay crumpled on the floor, the patterns no less stately, zigzags still elegant in their dormancy. They shed their uniforms for the T-shirts and jeans they’d been aching to wear all day-regular clothes, boring clothes, clothes I could wear whenever I wanted. Which room belonged to whom and which siblings had to share was constantly up for debate and it seemed to fluctuate monthly. When they returned home from school at 3:30 PM, they ran upstairs to their rooms. How magnificent to be united against a terrible adult! I spent as much time at their house as my parents would allow. Their lives under the reign of these strange babysitters reminded me of my favorite child protagonists, like orphan Annie or Matilda. Onlookers might have found it sad, but I found it fascinating: how utterly Dickensian my cousins’ childhoods were. The nannies never lasted long, and my three cousins once outsmarted the worst one, an old German woman named Ana, with an elaborate ruse to lock her out of their house. Furthermore, the cousins had a rotating cast of nannies that their parents-busy with a secret-clearance government job, the Army Reserve, and law school-found by posting ads at the local laundromat. First and foremost, I envied the fact that there were three of them and only one of me, my parents’ boring prized jewel. These uniforms, like everything else about my cousins’ lives, I envied desperately. The pattern first appeared to me in the school uniforms of my cousins: crisp, clean lines of navy and evergreen intersecting at perfect right angles. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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