QUEER TARTAN FOR LUXURY BRANDS

Scottish heritage, contemporary design and the art of inventing tradition

Queer Tartan is a contemporary Scottish design system combining traditional tartan, 3D animation, fine art and storytelling to create distinctive visual identities, textiles, objects and experiences for luxury brands.

Founded by Scottish artist and designer Fritha Lewin, Queer Tartan explores the relationship between heritage, identity, craftsmanship and invention.

Rather than treating tartan as a fixed historical pattern, Queer Tartan reimagines it as an expandable creative system — one that can be translated into fashion, interiors, accessories, packaging, moving image, installations and bespoke brand experiences.

The result is an unusual proposition for luxury brands: the opportunity to develop an original visual language with its own mythology, cultural references and sense of place.

A Background in Luxury and Creative Direction

Fritha Lewin has worked in design, illustration and creative communications for more than twenty years, with clients including Manolo Blahnik, Burberry, Charlotte Tilbury, Jo Malone London, Lacoste and The Body Shop.

Her experience spans fashion, beauty, luxury retail, branding and digital communication, combining commercial design expertise with an independent artistic practice.

Queer Tartan brings these disciplines together.

For luxury brands seeking something beyond a conventional textile print or seasonal graphic, the project offers an adaptable creative world that can extend across multiple products, materials and environments.

Applications include bespoke tartans, silk scarves, fashion accessories, leather goods, limited-edition artworks, packaging, window displays, immersive installations and animated brand imagery.

From 3D Animation to a New Design System

Fritha studied 3D animation at Glasgow School of Art in the 1990s, developing an early interest in the possibilities of computer-generated imagery.

Years later, while experimenting with 3D software to create textile designs and illustrations, she had a rather counterintuitive idea.

Instead of making her 3D models increasingly elaborate and complex, what would happen if she made them simpler?

She began reducing the models to their most elementary forms, effectively turning them into beads.

These simple, repeatable three-dimensional elements could then be arranged into intricate patterns, structures and compositions, combining the principles of traditional textile design with the possibilities of digital animation.

It was an unconventional approach to using 3D software, reversing the usual emphasis on increasingly detailed models and realistic rendering.

The resulting bead-based design language became an important foundation for Queer Tartan.

Traditional tartan is constructed through the intersection of coloured threads. Fritha's system extends the underlying principles of repetition, rhythm and colour into three-dimensional space, where individual elements can be rearranged, animated, distorted and transformed.

The same underlying visual language can be expressed as a printed textile, a silk scarf, a sculptural object, a digital animation or an installation.

Rather than using 3D software to imitate reality, Queer Tartan uses it to invent an entirely new decorative world.

This provides luxury brands with the opportunity to commission distinctive designs across physical and digital media, all connected by a coherent visual system.

An Identity Designed by Peter Horridge

Even the Queer Tartan logo has a story.

In the mid-2010s, while freelancing at a design agency in Camden, London, Fritha met fellow freelance designer Peter Horridge, whose work in luxury branding and typography she had long admired.

She begged him to design her a logo.

Peter's remarkable portfolio includes work for Liberty, Agent Provocateur, Claridge's and Fortnum & Mason. He also worked with Sir Jony Ive and LoveFrom on the official emblem for the coronation of King Charles III.

For Queer Tartan, Fritha commissioned a portrait-based identity inspired by the face of her friend, Rowan Gould, wearing a garland of rowan berries.

The logo can be seen in Peter Horridge's illustration portfolio.

Rowan isn't simply the face of the brand. She is also a character in The Ballad of Queer Tartan, Fritha's fictional world of circus mice, Scottish folklore, invented heritage and improbable adventures.

In the story, Rowan is an elderly rabbit who lives beside the sea in Findhorn and makes Japanese-inspired sukajan jackets. Her home and shop, Awkward Ligneous Doll, stand beside a rowan tree.

The real person becomes a fictional rabbit. The rabbit becomes part of a literary world. The literary world becomes a design identity.

This layering of real people, imagined histories, visual symbols and craftsmanship is central to Queer Tartan.

The logo isn't simply a commercial mark. It is a small piece of the mythology.

Liberty London, 2009: The Beginning of a Story

In 2009, Fritha attended one of Liberty London's celebrated designer open calls, when aspiring designers and artists would queue around the block for the opportunity to present their work to the department store's buying team.

Fritha was invited to meet Ed Burstell, then Managing Director of Liberty London, and presented a collection of six silk scarf designs featuring intricate patchwork landscapes and map-like compositions.

Burstell, the New York retail executive who became known for his transformation of Liberty, was subsequently profiled in The Scotsman in 2015 in an article titled New York fashion guru Ed Burstell on making Liberty a success.

Fritha documented her 2009 Liberty pitch, including photographs and the original designs, which can still be seen in her portfolio:

View Fritha's original 2009 Liberty London project

More than fifteen years later, those same designs have found an entirely unexpected new life.

They now appear in The Ballad of Queer Tartan as artworks created by Madeleine, one of the story's two circus-mouse protagonists, documenting her extraordinary hot-air balloon journey across the Scottish landscape.

What began as a collection of scarf designs for one of London's most famous luxury department stores has become part of a fictional historical archive.

It is a particularly good example of how Queer Tartan works: existing imagery can acquire new identities, meanings and histories through storytelling.

An artwork can become a textile. A textile can become a map. A map can become evidence of a journey undertaken by a fictional mouse.

And the whole thing can become part of an invented cultural heritage.

An Independent Museum in the Scottish Highlands

Queer Tartan is based in Forres, Moray, in a seventeenth-century building dating from 1668.

The building houses Ye Olde Queer Tartan Museum, an independent artist-created folk museum devoted to the fictional world of The Ballad of Queer Tartan.

The museum brings together textiles, sculptures, dolls, photographs, paintings, sound recordings, moving images, historical objects and elaborate miniature environments.

It operates somewhere between a traditional folk museum, an immersive art installation, a theatre set and a rather eccentric private collection.

The distinction between fact and fiction is deliberately playful. Historical references sit alongside invented events, imaginary creatures and artefacts that appear to document a queer past which never existed.

The museum provides a physical expression of the Queer Tartan design system and an unusual setting for private visits, creative conversations and potential collaborations.

Located in the Heart of Scotland's Heritage and Luxury Landscape

Forres is an extraordinary place from which to develop a contemporary Scottish luxury design practice.

The museum is approximately ten miles from Johnstons of Elgin, one of Scotland's most celebrated cashmere and fine textile manufacturers.

The wider region is home to internationally recognised Scottish names including Walkers Shortbread, Glenfiddich, The Macallan and Baxters represents another well-known Scottish heritage food brand.

There is also a remarkable concentration of castles, historic estates and places associated with Scottish royalty.

These include Brodie Castle, Cawdor Castle, Balmoral Castle — the Royal Family's Scottish residence in Aberdeenshire — and Ardross Castle, internationally recognised as the filming location of The Traitors.

The surrounding landscape is layered with ancient history.

Pictish carved stones, prehistoric monuments, ruined castles and old settlements sit alongside pine forests, beaches and dramatic Highland scenery.

Forres is itself closely associated with Shakespeare's Macbeth. The famous encounter between Macbeth, Banquo and the three witches is traditionally located on the blasted heath near Forres, while Cawdor Castle provides another connection to the play's imagined Scottish world.

The town is also home to Sueno's Stone, an extraordinary surviving Pictish monument.

A short distance away, Findhorn Bay forms part of the protected Culbin Sands, Culbin Forest and Findhorn Bay Site of Special Scientific Interest, an important coastal landscape of sandbanks, mudflats, woodland and wildlife.

The Moray coastline has also attracted international filmmakers. Locations around Culbin Sands and the wider Moray Firth were used in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.

This combination of heritage, natural beauty, mythology, traditional craft and internationally recognised Scottish brands creates an unusually rich cultural setting for Queer Tartan.

It is a place where ancient stories and contemporary luxury can quite naturally exist alongside one another.

Bespoke Collaborations and Commissions

Queer Tartan offers luxury brands an opportunity to commission work that reaches beyond surface decoration.

A bespoke tartan can become the starting point for an entire creative programme, incorporating original artwork, textiles, sculptural objects, moving images and storytelling.

A collaboration might begin with a scarf, an exclusive accessory, a set of collectible objects or a site-specific installation. It can also develop into a wider visual narrative across retail environments, events, digital media and limited-edition products.

The appeal lies in bringing together three elements: a recognisable Scottish design tradition, an experimental contemporary art practice and an original fictional universe.

Queer Tartan is particularly interested in collaborations with fashion houses, textile manufacturers, luxury hotels, heritage businesses, cultural institutions and brands looking for imaginative ways to connect craftsmanship with contemporary identity.

The aim is not simply to apply a tartan to a product.

It is to create something with a story worth telling.

For bespoke commissions, licensing enquiries, creative collaborations or private visits to Ye Olde Queer Tartan Museum, please get in touch.