The History of Tweed: A Menswear Favorite

The nineteenth century turned this humble cloth into a status symbol. Wealthy landowners were buying up Highland estates for sport, and they began commissioning distinctive tweeds in patterns unique to their land. These estate tweeds served a practical purpose as well as a social one. Their muted checks blended into the hillside, which helped stalkers and gamekeepers go unnoticed, and the patterns also identified who worked for whom. Famous examples include the Glen Urquhart check and the Balmoral tweed, the latter said to have been designed by Prince Albert for the royal estate in the 1850s. When Queen Victoria took to the Highlands, fashionable society followed, and tweed became the correct thing to wear for shooting, fishing and walking.

The Industrial Revolution made this possible at scale. Mills sprang up in Border towns such as Galashiels, Hawick and Selkirk, where water-powered machinery could produce cloth far faster than any hand loom. Later, Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, popularised tweed suits for country pursuits, and the Norfolk jacket, with its box pleats and belt, became a staple of the shooting field. Tweed soon found its way into golf, cycling and even early motoring, where its warmth and toughness were prized.

Making tweed is still, at heart, a straightforward process, though it takes patience. Raw wool is first sorted and scoured to remove grease and dirt, then dyed, often before it is spun, so that several colors can be blended together. The dyed wool is carded, which means combing the fibres into a loose, even web, and then spun into yarn. Tweed generally uses woollen-spun yarn, which keeps the fibres fluffy and slightly irregular, giving the fabric its characteristic texture and its trapped, insulating warmth. The yarn is wound onto a warp, threaded onto a loom and woven, usually in a twill, herringbone, check or houndstooth pattern. Finally, the cloth is washed and pressed so that the fibres bloom and the weave settles. Every stage leaves its mark, which is why two tweeds can look so different even when they appear similar at a glance.

For much of the twentieth century, tweed meant two quite different things. To country people, it was practical clothing for the shoot, the farm and the river. To everyone else, it was increasingly the uniform of the absent-minded professor, with its elbow patches and a faint whiff of pipe smoke. By the 1980s and 1990s, tweed had a fusty reputation, and younger men who wanted to look modern tended to avoid it.

The change came in the 2000s, and it has been building ever since. Part of it was the broader heritage revival in menswear, when a generation of men began to value clothes with a story, from raw denim and waxed jackets to brogues and flat caps. Tweed fitted neatly into this world. Television and film helped enormously: Downton Abbey put the country estate back in the public imagination, Peaky Blinders made flat caps and heavy tweed three-piece suits aspirational, and Sherlock Holmes, in his various modern guises, kept the deerstalker and the tweed coat in circulation. Designers noticed, and tweed began to appear regularly on runways and in high street collections alike.

There are deeper reasons too. Tailoring has become more of a choice than a necessity. Now that most workplaces are casual, a man who puts on a jacket does it deliberately, and tweed gives a jacket personality that a plain navy blazer lacks. It is textured, rich in colour and gloriously forgiving of the odd crease, and it pairs just as easily with jeans and trainers as with flannel trousers and leather boots. This flexibility is a big part of its appeal: the same tweed jacket can be dressed up for a wedding or dressed down for a weekend walk.