Stewart Dress

The colours on record are red, dark blue, black, yellow, white and green, the same six as Royal Stewart. The register's own note is the clearest description of the difference: yellow and white stripes of equal width, where Royal Stewart does not have them equal.

The threadcount is not shown without a login, so this site has not read it and does not draw the sett. The colours shown are approximations.

The register gives no designer and no exact date, only an estimate of c. 1850. It says the design appears to derive from the Vestiarium Scoticum, the 1842 book by the Sobieski Stuarts that the register elsewhere says included spurious documentation. Wikipedia, as a pointer, says the book was soon denounced as a forgery.

The register's wording is cautious: appears to derive, and the creation date is uncertain. That is the honest ceiling for this record.

The register lists further Stewart dress entries. Stewart, Dress #2 (SRT 1791) and Stewart, Dress Blue (SRT 1794, Kinloch Anderson, 1977) are both noted as taken from a dress in the collection of the RSM, Edinburgh. They are different setts, and the sources read do not show how their colours differ from Dress #1.

The record does not show when Dress #1 was first woven or sold.

The alias "Stewart, Dress #1" is the register's name. People also say "Dress Stewart" or "Stuart Dress", and the surname is spelled Stewart or Stuart in the register's own entries. The register's own entries use both spellings, so a search on one may miss entries under the other.

The register classes it as Clan/Family. It does not say the Stewart chief or the Stewart Society approved it. The Stewart Society's page on tartans is read for Royal Stewart, not for this variant.

Three entries in the register carry "dress" in the name. They are not copies of one another, and the register records them differently.

• Stewart, Dress #1 (SRT 1765, Clan/Family). A dress version of Royal Stewart with yellow and white of equal size. Estimated c. 1850, believed to derive from the Sobieski Stuarts' Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842. No designer is named.
• Stewart, Dress #2 (SRT 1791, category Other). Its note says only that it was taken from a dress in the collection of "the RSM, Edinburgh", the register's own abbreviation, which this site has not expanded. No designer or date.
• Stewart, Dress Blue (SRT 1794, Clan/Family). Designed by Kinloch Anderson Ltd, dated 1 January 1977, with the same note: taken from a dress in the RSM, Edinburgh collection.

Reading the three together: only Dress #1 has a documented link to the Vestiarium, and only Dress #1 is described as a version of Royal Stewart. The other two come from a garment in a museum collection, which the register does not date. The 1977 date on Dress Blue is the date given for the design record, and the register does not say how old the dress it was taken from is. The two museum-derived entries are also classed differently, one as Other and one as Clan/Family, though the notes are alike. The record gives no reason for that split, so it may reflect when and by whom each was entered.

Another register entry puts the same circle of designers near the Stewart name. Hay Stewart (SRT 1850) is credited to Wilsons of Bannockburn and dated 1838, and its note says a letter of 1938 considered it probably designed by or for the Sobieski Stuart brothers. The register describes it as resembling the Victoria Stewart pattern, with a double red overcheck on the white.

Two things follow, and the sources read do not resolve them. First, a register date of 1838 sits four years before the Vestiarium Scoticum was published in 1842, and Wikipedia, as a pointer, says the brothers had presented a manuscript copy to Sir Thomas Dick Lauder in the late 1820s, so the brothers' designs were not new in 1842. Second, the attribution rests on a letter written a century later, so it is a reported opinion and not a documented commission. It shows that Stewart-family patterns of the 1830s to 1850s were being made in the same trade and by the same people the register links to the Vestiarium, and nothing more.

The Stewart Society's tartan pages describe Royal Stewart and list further Stewart tartans in their menu: Prince Charles Edward Stewart, Stuart of Bute, Stewart of Appin, Stewart of Ardshiel, Stewart of Atholl, Stewart of Galloway and Racing Stewart. The page read for this record does not describe a Hunting, Dress or Old version, and it does not mention any of the three dress entries above. So the society's published position on dress setts, if it has one, was not found. The register lists the dress entries as Clan/Family or Other, and that classification is the register's own.

Because the name is shared, a label that says "Stewart Dress" does not identify the sett. A search for "stewart dress" on the register also returns entries such as Anthony Plaid, Stewart (Fashion, Artmark), Glen Stewart (Fashion, Lochcarron of Scotland), Castle Stewart (District) and Racing Stewart (Corporate), because the search matches the words separately. None of those is a clan dress tartan.

When buying, ask the weaver for the register number and compare it with the entries above:

• If the cloth is described as Royal Stewart with equal yellow and white stripes, the match is Dress #1, SRT 1765.
• If it is described as copied from a museum dress, it may be Dress #2 or Dress Blue, and the weaver should say which.
• If it is a Kinloch Anderson cloth called Dress Blue, the register dates the design to 1977, not to the nineteenth century.

A weaver who cannot name the entry is selling a name, and the register gives no way to check it. This is advice drawn from how the register records these entries, not a statement about any particular seller.