Two archives meet here. The MacAndreas tartan was designed by Vivienne Westwood with the weavers Lochcarron of Scotland as a tribute to her husband and design partner, Andreas Kronthaler; it appeared in the Anglomania collection of autumn 1993 and was entered on the Scottish Register of Tartans in the same year. It is a real tartan, not a decorative approximation of one.
The other archive is Cole & Son's own. John Perry, the founder, had seen fine silk being dyed in France in the early nineteenth century and adapted what he saw for paper, dragging horse-hair brushes along the surface by machine to draw fine lines through the colour. That technique produced Jaspe, and it is the technique applied here: every thread of the tartan hand-painted with a strie brush.
The result is a tartan that behaves like cloth. Warp and weft are legible where the lines cross, the sett has the softness of something woven rather than printed, and the whole surface carries the fine vertical grain of the brush. It is a considerable amount of work for an effect most people will register only as texture, which is generally the mark of something worth having. Plain joinery and unpatterned upholstery let the brushwork be seen.
