New tartans inspired by themes including horror movies and the Philippines in southeast Asia have been designed by students at Heriot-Watt University’s School of Textiles and Design.
Garments made from the new tartans, which are printed on fabric, will be part of the Degree Show staged in the Scottish Borders this May by final year students at the School.
Fourth year students Craig Taylor and Kayleigh Wyllie, who are both completing their Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree in Fashion, have both designed tartans as part of their final year ‘Honours Collection’ and are each making eight garments to showcase in the Degree Show.
Craig, 26, from the town of Beith in Ayrshire, has created designs inspired by the work of British horror movie writer and director Clive Barker – including punk subculture – and queer history.
He explained: “One of the big inspirations for Clive Barker’s film, Hellraiser, was punk subculture and wearing tartan was one of the hallmarks of this movement.
“I also looked at the queer side of Barker’s work and the of idea of liberation. For example, the English banned tartans in 1746 after the Jacobite uprising and the Battle of Culloden.
“My tartan design also includes an upside-down pink triangle, which is a queer symbol that originated in Nazi Germany as a way to shame gay men that were in concentration camps.”
Craig’s tartan is pink, red, black and white and gold, with pink triangle motifs in the squares created by the tartan’s crossing horizontal and vertical lines. Leather features alongside tartan in his garment designs, which include a cape, a dress and jacket set, a leather harness and matching jacket, a shirt and a pair of trousers. Dramatic three-dimensional structures including a large stand-up collar also reflect the visual style of Clive Barker’s movies.
Kayleigh, 22, is from the town of Glenrothes in Fife, but was born in the Philippines, a string of more than 7,000 islands between the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
Kayleigh moved to Scotland with her family when she was aged seven and wanted to create a tartan design that reflected both Filipino and Scottish cultures and also commemorated her Scottish father, who moved from Scotland to live in the Philippines and passed away in 2009.
“My dad and granddad often wore kilts at special events like weddings and funerals, so it was nice to create my own tartan just to pay homage to those two men,” Kayleigh said.
“My tartan design includes a navy colour from a kilt my granddad wore to my auntie’s wedding. For a personal touch, I’ve also included my dad’s handwriting. I got this from his university papers and have inserted his last name, Wyllie, as repeated parallel lines of text.”
To reflect her Scottish and Filipino heritage, Kayleigh’s tartan design also combines purple and green colours from the Scottish thistle and white from the national flower of the Philippines, a white jasmine called the Sampaguita, or Arabian jasmine
“I’ve combined both cultures by including the thistle and the national flower of the Philippines, which is a white flower with a small yellow centre,” Kayleigh explained.
The garments Kayleigh is making for the Degree Show include a tartan blouse with machine embroidered motifs; a tartan top with arched and pointed shoulders inspired by Scottish and Filipino architecture; a horizontal pleated large circle skirt and top; a corset; a shawl and a pillar-like top created with pintucks.
Both students opted to print their tartan designs onto fabric – as weaving them would take too long produce the lengths of fabric they needed to create their Degree Show garments.
After the show, Kayleigh hopes to gift some of the fabric to her family, and get experience in the design-and-make side of the fashion industry.
She said: “I’d like to give some fabric to my family, because there is a personal link to it. I’d also like to include some of it in my portfolio to show to industry – and that would hopefully show people that my designs are different.”
Craig hopes to create his own fashion brand in the future. He said: “I’d like my own brand, and to own a small business. That might be a good few years after I finish uni. First, I’d like to work in the industry for a while and get more insight into the day-to-day operations of how it works.”
The 2025 Degree Show of Heriot-Watt School of Textiles and Design will be open to the public from 10am to 4pm daily between Saturday 17 May and Wednesday 21 May and will be staged at the High Mill building, a converted textile mill in Galashiels in the Scottish Borders, where the school is based.
Heriot-Watt School of Textiles and Design is a centre of excellence in design and dates back to 1883, when classes in weaving, dyeing and chemistry were introduced to train workers for the local textiles industry.
Honorary Graduates include British designer Jasper Conran, the late British fashion icon Dame Vivienne Westwood and retail expert Mary Portas.
The Scottish Borders is at the heart of Scotland’s luxury textile and design industry and has a long history of textile production.
