Harris Tweed

I've had the pictured stack of Harris tweed swatches sitting in my office for a couple of years and thought it time to do something with them. So, here they are (click on the photo for a close-up that shows the colors better).

Beloved of American trads, Harris designs are relatively generic. Unlike the district checks, Harris tweed is not intended to disappear into the background "on the hill" or to identify a particular estate. This particular batch is 14 ounce (I know the tags say 7 ozs but Harris is woven on single width looms so that number is doubled to make it comparable to most cloth on the market) tweed from Harrison's of Edinburgh, in a variety of colorations. I especially like the lovat solid at the bottom but I don't know if I'll ever get around to having a jacket made from it.

Harris is distinguished as the only tweed with a brand. It's defined by law as "hand woven by the islanders at their homes in the Outer Hebrides, finished in the islands of Harris, Lewis, North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist and Barra and their several purtenances (The Outer Hebrides) and made from pure virgin wool dyed and spun in the Outer Hebrides."

Perhaps the biggest contribution of the Harris ecology to the world at large is not the tweed so much as the employment that the cloth provides for so much of the population of these remote islands. A substantial cottage industry of weavers works on looms at their homes to produce lengths of tweed in weights ranging from 12 ounces up to 20. While the looms are 'pedalled' by the weavers with no external power source allowed, the cloth provided to the weavers has been machine dyed and spun using methods similar to those of any other textile operation. And after the weaving is complete, bundles of cloth are collected for machine finishing at a processing center before they are sent on to be turned into all the variety of jackets, caps and other goods that the stuff is known for. The cloth is fine but the "hand woven" bit is over-hyped.

In the United States, Ben Silver among others offers a variety of ready to wear Harris tweed odd jackets (the cloth is too loosely woven for trousers) for the not terribly outrageous price of $595 each.