MacLachlan (Chief's Dress)
This is one variant — a specific cloth: this exact thread count and colourway, with its own provenance below. It is one weaving of the sett (the scale-free proportion — the same cloth at any scale or shade), whose colour order is pattern KYKYKYKY.
Sourced from register-of-tartans. It is a 8 stripe tartan.
Original link https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/tartanDetails.aspx?ref=2585
2 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- 01/01/1842 — MacLachlan (Chief's Dress) (register-of-tartans, record)
Scottish Tartans Society notes: The design comes from the Vestiarium Scoticum (1842). The authors, the Sobieski Stuart brothers, enjoyed a popular following among the Scottish gentry in the early Victorian era, and in the spirit of the times, added mystery, romance and some spurious historical documentation to the subject of tartan. Of the better known tartans, the book offers some minor variation, but in other cases it provides the only recorded version of many tartans in use today. In 1893 D.W. Stewart said: 'in use by present MacLachlan of MacLachlan' which is why this is often called the Chief's sett. - 1842 — MacLachlan - 1842 (Chief's Dress) (tartans-authority, record)
STS notes: The design comes from the Vestiarium Scoticum (1842). The authors, the Sobieski Stuart brothers, enjoyed a popular following among the Scottish gentry in the early Victorian era, and in the spirit of the times, added mystery, romance and some spurious historical documentation to the subject of tartan. Of the better known tartans, the book offers some minor variation, but in other cases it provides the only recorded version of many tartans in use today. In 1893, D.W. Stewart said: "in use by present MacLachlan of MacLachlan" which is why this is often called the Chief's sett (pattern).
Dataset — provenance for this record, inherited from the source manifest
- source
- Scottish Register of Tartans
- data captured from
- https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database/blob/master/data/register-of-tartans/data.csv
- data date
- 1842 (this record)
- licence
- Crown copyright
Capture chain — the hands this data passed through, oldest first; each capture carries its own licence
- Scottish Register of Tartans · Crown copyright
the living register — still published by National Records of Scotland - thetartan/tartan-database 2016-2017 · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Levko Kravets's frozen compilation — the capture we vendored, and where its CC licence text came from - this dictionary captured 2026-06-10 · commit 5bf86c7566
each re-capture is a git commit to data/sources
Register references
External register numbers recorded for this tartan.
- Scottish Register of Tartans: 2585
- Scottish Tartans Authority (ITI): 1277
- Scottish Tartans World Register: 1277
Thread count
K/12 LY4 K42 LY4 K12 LY48 K4 LY/12
One full sett is 252 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| LY | #DCBC32 #DCBC32 | oklch(80.0% 0.150 95.2) |
Sample pattern
Nearest tartan variants
The nearest existing variants by ΔTartan distance, with this cloth at the top so the swatches line up against it.
Neighbour map
Every grey dot is one of 13621 variants placed by the first two principal components of the ΔTartan feature space (42% of its variance). Red is this tartan; blue dots are its nearest — click one to open its page.
ID: /variants/s8/k6ly2k21ly2k6ly24k2ly6~x2/