Breaking Plaid
In fifth grade, my family moved me and my brother to a new school. Nearly all mom made from her part time job went to our tuition. The previous school had no dress code: wear what you want, and I basically looked like the other kids. I fit in. The new school had a plaid uniform, which on paper, sounded like a great equalizer. Everyone in the same plaid. Everyone the same.
It did not work out that way.
That school was full of families in a different tax bracket than mine, and the uniform did nothing to hide it. The girls had the right shoes — penny loafers, docksiders — and the right sweaters, monogrammed, matching knee socks, hair pulled back in painted barrettes. I walked in that first day in the same plaid, and the wrong everything else. Turns out a uniform has nothing to do with fitting in.
I got lucky and found a friend early on, so school itself was fine. But I was stuck in plaid through the end of high school. While I found my niche, had some friends, did ok in class — I never got used to the forced conformity of a uniform.
During these years, I was figuring out that I was good at art, which is its own kind of education in not following the rules. I wanted out of the uniform, the rules, the plaid. I wanted to make my own version of things.
It took a few decades, but I finally got to make the plaid mine.
The design
Breaking Plaid takes a traditional Black Watch tartan grid — the same deep navy and forest green I wore for the better part of a decade — and runs fluid wave lines straight through it, cutting across the strict crosshatch like the structure finally gave up trying to hold still. The traditional tartan is still recognizable: the grid, the crossing verticals and horizontals, the woven-linen texture, all present and correct. But the waves move through it with a kind of restlessness the original pattern was never allowed to have.
It’s a plaid I’d actually choose to wear. Which, if you’d told ten-year-old me that would eventually feel like a victory, I would not have believed you.
Shop the collection
Breaking Plaid is available now as fabric, wallpaper, and home goods, with more products on the way.
