Tartan trews

I'm Scottish. Or maybe Italian. Can you tell?

This one’s a love letter to my Margaret Howell trousers. I first saw these in Liberty, and fell in love with them, even though they are much more brown/rust than my typical colour palette. I just loved the heather-coloured tartan, the masculine shape, the little turn-up, the soft, fluid wool. Then I looked at the price, and went off to gaze upon things which appeared not completely out of my range.

But I kept thinking about them. I thought that if they went down dramatically in the sales, I could consider them. Every time I saw another pair of trousers, I thought about these ones. I watched the Margaret Howell website like a hawk. I didn’t buy other things, because they would mean I couldn’t afford these if the price came down. It seemed worth taking the risk that they disappear without ever going into the sales, because I loved them so much that others paled in comparison.

They went into the sales. They were still more than I had paid for anything. I compared measurements on the website with my measurements. I’m normally a British eight, but were they small in the waist? If I got a 10 would they be too big on the hips? I dithered. Sizes started selling out. I gulped and ordered them, in the 10 (the 8 had gone, anyway).

They arrived. I loved/love them. They are a little roomy in the hips and there’s some space at the waist too. I could not figure out what to wear with them. Red? Burgundy? I tried grey, black, cream. But in the end I liked this green or pink best, and stopped trying to match any of the colours in the fabric.

When you leave your birth country as a young child (we moved from Scotland to England when I was two, and then went briefly back to Scotland before moving to Italy when I was seven), and grow up in a different country, but not OF that country, your connection to where you feel you come from is tenuous and also unbreakable.

My paternal grandfather was born in Glasgow to Irish parents. My paternal grandmother’s surname was Gunn: the Gunns as a clan were nearly all killed off by the other clans as they were horse rustlers and general bad lots (my grandmother was absolutely not a bad lot). My maternal grandfather was a doted-upon only child who came from a family of lace-makers from Ayr. My maternal grandmother was the only girl in a family of six who lost their mother to the Spanish flu when the baby was two months old, and then grew up with the original wicked stepmother. My father’s family were Irish Catholics, my mother’s family were Protestant until they became Jehovah’s Witnesses, and my parents met at work when my dad was just back from his National Service: she was 18 and he was 20. They got engaged when she was 21. He was the first Catholic to have been employed by his place of work, and they were very pleased with themselves for being so broadminded. When my parents got annoyed with their offsprings’ rebellious natures, it’s worth remembering that in Glasgow in the 1950s they fell in love over a secular divide, and then moved away to another country, which takes some strength of character. Or sheer bloody-mindedness.

I come from a big family, with cousins upon cousins, but we (my parents, my little sister and me) moved to Italy in November, 1970. There were no cheap flights, no cheap phone calls. Every two years or so we’d go back for a visit. A few of my aunts visited, once the cousins closest to my sister and me in age. We went to a British school, and everyone we knew was in a similar boat to us. We spoke English all the time, we learnt about the Romans and the Normans, we talked about home but it wasn’t where we were living. We grew up in a strange limbo where when we were in Italy we were passionately proud of being Scots, and when we went to Scotland we were reminded of how much we loved everything in Italy. I went to college in England, and it became my home when I was there, but I could never fit in, although I had imagined I would. When I came back to Italy I told myself it was temporary, but at some point I realised that I love living here, it is home, and this is where I live. And it absolutely is - it is where my parents, my daughter and my grandaughter live, and how much more home can you get than that?

Probably about the time that I switched from angsty existentialist to hopeful optimist, I somehow managed to reframe the whole limbo thing into something much more emotionally nourishing. Instead of permanently being an unmoored, rootless outsider, I saw myself as unimaginably privileged: I belonged to two wildly romantic nations (also, obviously extremely prosaic but let’s focus on the fun stuff). I could cherry pick the best bits from both, claim them as my own, and ignore all the less satisfactory bits.

Hence my love of tartan, paisleys, fairisle. And also marble, bargello, Fortuny. This is why I hanker after northern isles and wild landscapes, and dream about Edinburgh and Copenhagen, even though every time I get a dose of British or Danish weather I scuttle gratefully back to sunny Roman winters. This is why the two places on earth I love most right now are Shetland and Venice, other worlds afloat on very different seas.

So when I wear my tartan trousers, I love how chic they are, I love how put-together I feel. And at the same time, I plug right back into Rupert Bear¹, and the roll of brown paper which came to us in Italy each week: enclosed in the paper were the Sunday funnies and comics, sent by my Grandpa in Glasgow. Rupert, The Broons, Oor Wullie, and sometimes a copy of the Beano and the Dandy. When I wear paisley, it’s a reminder that I was born in Paisley (pure chance, that’s where the hospital was, it’s not where my parents were living at the time). When I wear fairisle, it’s a reminder of my grandmothers, to whom all my creative talents are always attributed. My favourite advertising campaign has always been the one for Irn Bru - made in Scotland from girders which is synonymous for me with Glasgow.

Everyone has to belong to somewhere, even if it’s largely a construct. My mother would never wear tartan trousers - too performatively Scottish. But tartan is perennially popular in Italy, and I’ll happily embrace the performative aspects because I’m one step removed.

There are crossovers, of course: Italy and Scotland are both renowned producers of cashmere, they have a strong tradition of textile craft. And I love tweeds and silks and cashmere and linen. I value craftsmanship. I love the fabrics of both my countries in the same way I love both their landscapes and cities. I probably love more about Italy because I know more, and it’s my home: when I go into the city, with all of its millenia of history on every street, all I can think is, Quanto sei bella Roma. I despise any coffee that is not Italian, I love the food, I think Italians dress better than anyone else. I appreciate so much of the society in which I love, and I ignore the inconveniences, just as I embrace my highly romanticised view of my Scottishness.

1. Impossible in my family to wear tartan trews without comparison to RB, even though his are obviously very loud and mine very tasteful.

Images: wikipedia X Britannica