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294 Fiona Anderson IWeed, Landscape, and Modernity The design of these textiles might then be considered as constituting a blending, or intermingling of the dynamics of fashion and urban sartorial tastes and lifestyles, with rural environments and contexts. It is tempting to view this scenario simply as the mixing of contradictory, or opposing elements. Most recent literature on fashion has quite rightly posited strong connections between fashion, urbanization, and modernity. The move of vast sections of first the British and then the European population into urban contexts from the late eighteenth century onwards has been seen to have greatly heightened the importance of appearances and therefore fashion within social life. Urban contexts have also been seen as pivotal to the rise of newly sophisticated and dynamic ways of making, promoting, and selling fashion, particularly from the late nineteenth century onwards (Breward 1999; Entwhistle 2000; Lehmann 2000; Wilson 1985). The conception that modern fashion is an urban phenomenon therefore underpins most recent publication on the subject and I do not wish to contest the broad significanceor relevance of these arguments. However, exploring the history of tweed as an ephemeral fashion textile within the context of recent literature from cultural geography, empire studies and gender studies presents interesting new perspectives about the relationship between fashion in modernity and urban and rural landscapes. For example, as Matless (1998) argues in Landscape and Englishness, owing to the integral relationships between industrialization, urbanization, and modernity, conceptions of the rural are often understood in direct opposition to this, in other words in the one-dimensional sense of being anti-modern and traditional. Clearly, in order to explore in more depth the widespread popularity in the late nineteenth century of tweed designs that reference rural landscapes it is necessary to examine contemporary views and engagement with ideas of the rural at that time. Recent research within the study of landscape has focused on it as a process linked to the formation of social and subjective identities. For example, in 2003 the editors of the Handbook of Cultural Geography argued that: the idea of a fixed identity unambiguously belonging to one group and unambiguously expressed in space has been replaced by notions of more fluid identities belonging to particular subject positions which can vary in intensity and can be combined in many different ways, so challenging homologous explanations (Anderson et al. 2003: 7). These ideas show clear links with recent developments within multidisciplinary work on fashion and identity. In addition, W. J. T. Mitchell in his book Landscape and Power argues that "Landscape is a dynamic medium, in which we 'live and move and have our being,' but also a
spinning the Ephemeral with Ihe Sublime 295 medium that is itself in motion from one place or time to another" (Mitchell 1994: 1-2). This view of landscape does not make rigid distinctions between cities as mobile, constantly shifting spaces against perceptions of rural landscapes as "natural" and unchanging. Instead this understanding of landscape as an "activity" points to potentially important relationships between modern culture and the rural, it is interesting to consider this view of landscape in relation to historical developments within the environments that influenced Scotch tweed designs. The success of the tweed industry from the 1850s was intrinsically linked to an expansion in the popularity of specific sporting and leisure pursuits and by implication to radical changes in land ownership and usage within the Scottish Highlands. By the mid-nineteenth century the Highlands had been the subject of dramatic economic and social upheavals, which have been grouped together under the term the Highland Clearances. This involved the forced displacement of local people by landowners, who subsequently converted the large number of deserted small holdings into extensive sheep farms and deer forests (Dossena 2000: p41). By the 1850s many estates had been bought by English or Lowland Scottish wealthy gentleman and by the 1870s the emphasis in land usage moved even further towards the dominance of deer forests and grouse moors. For example, Mackenzie states that "No fewer than three million acres of Scotland were converted from pasture to moor and forest in the nineteenth century" (Mackenzie 1988: 20). This increasingly shaped the Highlands as a depopulated area that principally functioned as a sporting playground for the British and international wealthy elite. These changes are particularly interesting in relation to the consideration of landscape and modernity, in that the supposedly incontrovertible logic of human social progress creating more "developed" and less "wild" and "natural" landscapes is turned on its head through landowners creating suitable environments in which grouse, deer and therefore modern conceptions of sport and leisure would thrive. The modernity of these developments and their intrinsically commodified, rather than conservationist nature is further revealed by the fashionable, ephemeral nature of the tweed cloths worn by upper-, upper-middle- and middle-class consumers of this fashionable lifestyle. The late nineteenth century also saw an expansion in the tourism industry aimed at the middle class and the real "opening up" of the Highlands as a holiday destination. Small numbers of more adventurous tourists began traveling to the Highlands in the late eighteenth century (Lambert 1999). However, it took the literary endeavors of writers like Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, as well as improved rail links and scores of guide books, to help create the large influx of tourists of the closing decades of the nineteenth century (Whyte2002: 110). This further encouraged the commodification of that landscape, its transformation into an "object to be purchased, consumed and even brought home in the form of souvenirs, such as postcards and photo albums." From the late nine-
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