Tea at Trianon: English Tweed

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, April 10, 2022

English Tweed

From Country Life:

The image of tweed as a country cloth derives from its traditional use for sportswear. Estate tweeds developed for shooting and stalking as camouflage for the hill, with a reputation for being tough-wearing and weatherproof. They were woven from the thicker, native wools long used by Scottish and north-country mills, which gave tweed its image of being a rough, coarse-textured cloth.

However, says textile manufacturer and merchant Richard Martin, ‘tweed is a perception more than anything else. It’s hard to define because there’s no technical definition. Any twill (cloth with a diagonal patterned structure), woven using carded — as opposed to combed (worsted) — wool, can be called a tweed’. The word is said to be a corruption of ‘twill’, pronounced ‘tweel’ by a Scots merchant, whose English buyer misheard him and assumed his cloth was named after the famous river.

Guy Hills, founder and creative director of Dashing Tweeds, became fascinated by the history of tweed in men’s clothing when working as a photographer on Savile Row. ‘Poring over ledgers of swatches, I found that, contrary to the assumption that tweeds were always sludge browns and greens, the colours in about the 1860s were bonkers. Tweed, worn for golf, racing, motoring and cycling, as well as for shooting and fishing, became the acceptable way for men to wear colour.’ (Read more.)