Black Watch Dress (Fashion)
This is one variant — a specific cloth: this exact thread count and colourway, with its own provenance below. It is one weaving of the sett (the scale-free proportion — the same cloth at any scale or shade), whose colour order is pattern BKBKGKGKWBWBW.
Sourced from tartans-authority. It is a 13 stripe tartan.
Original link https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/tartanDetails.aspx?ref=3094
2 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- 1882 — Black Watch Dress (Fashion) (tartans-authority, record)
A confusing situation with three contenders for the title of Black Watch Dress (this one plus 1965 & 3700), none of which is official. The Clan Sutherland (USA) website calls this version 'Black Watch Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders Dress' and notes: "This tartan dates to about 1930 when the earliest known sample was available from John Lewis (a London store) who labeled it as Black Watch Dress. Messrs. Anderson of Edinburgh who obtained a sample from John Lewis labeled it as a Sutherland Tartan." A letter in the Black Watch Museum in Perth shows that Messrs Anderson wrote the following to a Captain Milne stationed at Queen's Barracks in Perth on 5th May 1937: "We are in receipt of your letter regarding the so-called Black Watch Dress Tartan. There was a vogue some 50 or 60 years ago to produce dress tartans for various families or Clans. As far as our information goes, this Black Watch Tartan was produced at that time, presumably for private use, not in any way connected with the Regiment. A considerable quantity of it may have been used, but it is not in any way authentic." - pre 1930 — Black Watch Dress (Symmetrical) (register-of-tartans, record)
Information taken from the Clan Sutherland website that this tartan dates to about 1930 when the earliest known sample was found in a John Lewis store, labelled as Black Watch Dress. Messrs. Anderson of Edinburgh obtained a sample from John Lewis and labelled it as a Sutherland Tartan.
Dataset — provenance for this record, inherited from the source manifest
- source
- Scottish Tartans Authority
- data captured from
- https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database/blob/master/data/tartans-authority/data.csv
- data date
- 1882 (this record)
- licence
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Capture chain — the hands this data passed through, oldest first; each capture carries its own licence
- Scottish Tartans Authority
the heritage body's archive — its tartan-ferret record browser is retired (links repaired to the SRT, above) - thetartan/tartan-database 2016-2017 · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Levko Kravets's frozen compilation — the capture we vendored, and where its CC licence text came from - this dictionary captured 2026-06-10 · commit 5bf86c7566
each re-capture is a git commit to data/sources
Register references
External register numbers recorded for this tartan.
- Scottish Register of Tartans: 4935
- Scottish Tartans Authority (ITI): 3094
Thread count
B/4 K4 B12 K12 DG16 K4 DG16 K12 W4 B4 W24 B4 W/4
One full sett is 232 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| B | #466CC8 #466CC8 | oklch(55.1% 0.149 265.0) |
| DG | #053819 #053819 | oklch(30.0% 0.075 151.3) |
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| W | #F7F7F7 #F7F7F7 | oklch(97.6% 0.000 89.9) |
Sample pattern
Nearest tartan variants
The nearest existing variants by ΔTartan distance, with this cloth at the top so the swatches line up against it.
Neighbour map
Every grey dot is one of 13621 variants placed by the first two principal components of the ΔTartan feature space (42% of its variance). Red is this tartan; blue dots are its nearest — click one to open its page.
ID: /variants/s13/b1k1b3k3dg4k1dg4k3w1b1w6b1w1~x4/