As textile company Dashing Tweeds, weaver Kirsty McDougall and photographer Guy Hills have given this traditional fabric a striking, city makeover. Their website tells us they have “created a range of tweeds for the 21st century, inspired by the colours of London, from the wet pavements of Piccadilly to the green parks of St. James’.”
We talked to Kirsty about the ins and outs of developing their colourful, progressive designs, the looming danger of “weaver’s leg” and the glories of tweed geekdom.
By Victoria Ford
When is a fabric a tweed? The word tweed is a deviation of the word twill, which is a weave structure, and it's normally a wool fabric in a tweed yarn, woven in a 2/2 twill. For example, plain weave is just 'under one, over one', etc. A twill is a diagonal pattern across the cloth.
What we do with Dashing Tweeds is not strictly tweed, but it's based on the idea of a twill structure. There are thousands of types of wool which give you different qualities of fabric. Mostly I work in wool and at the moment we have a reflective yarn that we weave in as well.
Did you invent this reflective yarn? It's been around for a long time but I don't think it's been put into tweed before. It gives the fabric a nice, luminescent quality. Since the cycling thing has kicked off it's been associated with people taking up cycling but not wanting to look like they're in the Tour De France.
Tweed is the original sportswear fabric because it's hard wearing, warm and waterproof. It's really practical. It was originally an outdoor fabric and it's got lanolin so the water rolls off. We make some with Teflon too which is completely waterproof.
Why did you choose to sample colours from the city environment for your palette? That started because most tweeds, like Harris Tweed, are based on the landscape where they were developed, since part of it was to be camouflaged. We thought we could do a London version, so we matched up colours of paint and road markings and took inspiration from the things around us. We didn't want it to look like country tweed.
Who are your clients? It's a really mixed bag. We have concessions for our clothing so we sell fabric by the metre on Saville Row and we do jobs for fashion designers and companies. It's really a niche market. There are loads of good craftspeople that make tweed but we want our fabric to be more fashion.
How did you get into weaving? I started off at art school but I also had an interest in science. I really liked weaving because it was a good mixture of maths and being creative. I think because I'm quite a messy person and things are chaotic, I like the serenity of weaving. It reins me in a little bit. I became fascinated by the infinite possibilities of cloth, so I studied it at university and then did an MA.
I got really into jacquard weaving because I like hard shapes as well as textures. Using jacquard allows you to draw something and then weave it. Weave is about texture and subtlety and I was quite interested in subverting - almost making it in bad taste. Because it's such a precious process, I felt like I wanted the outcome to be quite ugly, but exciting. So originally I started doing a lot of leopard motifs but in really beautiful silks and colours.
Tell us about your loom. This is called a Dobby Loom. You physically have to weave everything yourself, and most of the work I do, I do on this. You work the pedals and then your arms too, so you're doing this strange workout all day. You have to watch your back because you can get a bit slouchy. There are some looms which you only work with one leg so you can get 'weaver's leg', which is one muscly leg and one not so muscly leg.
Does your Scottish background influence your love of weaving? I'd like to think it doesn't but it probably does a little bit. I was born on the Isle of Lewis which is in the Outer Hebrides, then grew up in Dunkeld in the Highlands. I have strong memories of hearing the sounds of weaving and watching it as a little girl. Watching the shafts lifting up and down can be quite mesmerising. I also recently found out we're descended from French Huguenot weavers.
What are you working on now? I'm working with nanotechnology at the moment to make traditional cloth with properties you can't necessarily see, like stealth technology! But it's a bit secret still.
How does one choose a good tweed? It's personal, but for me it's about the blend of colour, the proportion of colour, scale of check or scale of structure and the quality of the handle - how it feels. It's really a colour thing for me; if there's a shadow, if there's a blend, you can tell. You can become quite specialised and a bit of a tweed geek. 
More about Dashing Tweeds' fine creations
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