Midnight Glen
Midnight Glen
The glen check came out of one Scottish valley in the 1840s and never left.
There are a handful of patterns in menswear that everybody recognises and almost nobody can name. The glen check is the best of them.
One Valley
The pattern is properly called the Glenurquhart check, after Glen Urquhart, a valley in Inverness-shire in the Scottish Highlands. It appeared there in the 1840s, on an estate, as a way to identify the people who belonged to it.
That was the fashion of the time among Highland estates. Each one wanted its own cloth, so its keepers and its household could be told apart at a distance across a hillside. The glen check is the one that outlived every other estate pattern and walked out of Scotland into the rest of the world.
How It Is Made
A glen check is not one check. It is two, nested inside each other.
Small checks of alternating dark and light yarn make up the ground, and then larger blocks of those small checks sit inside a bigger grid. That is why it shimmers when you look at it from across a room and resolves into crisp geometry when you get close.
When a fine overcheck in a second color is laid over the top of it, the cloth is usually called a Prince of Wales check. That name comes from the Duke of Windsor, who wore it constantly and put it in front of the entire world in the 1920s and 1930s.
Why It Works on Everything
A glen check reads as a neutral from a distance and as a pattern up close. That is a rare property in cloth and it is why the design has survived nearly two centuries without changing.
It sits happily with indigo. It sits happily with cream. It works on a sharp jacket and on a rough one, which most patterns cannot manage.
Midnight
The Midnight Glen Tartan Harris Tweed is coming to Black Bear Brand.
Midnight is the right register for this pattern. Take a glen check down into deep blue black and the grid nearly disappears in low light and then opens up in sun, so the jacket behaves like two different jackets across one day.
It is hand woven in the Outer Hebrides, by a weaver at their own home, on a loom driven by their own feet. Every fifty meters of it is inspected and stamped by hand with the Orb.
Three Harris Tweeds are woven for us each year and three jackets come from them. This is one of the three.
A Way Of Life.
Shop the Story
the Harris Tweed Psychedelic BLUE Tartan Western Jacket
Related Reading
Harris Tweed: The Only Cloth Protected by an Act of Parliament