Relive Scotland's glory days of textile production – when the likes of Pringle and Mackintosh ruled the waves

IN THE old days, a label reading Made In Scotland was quite a thing.

Attached to a precious sweater or stout waterproof, it was a mark of quality, showing the jersey or coat in question was the real deal. The idea that it was an heirloom in waiting, something that might be passed on to one's descendents or, in extreme circumstances, have to eventually be taken outside and shot, was woven into the fabric.

Not that these were stodgy or merely serviceable items of clothing.

Looking at the advertising images and films collected for the forthcoming Inventors Of Tradition exhibition, it's clear that Scottish knitwear was the outerlayer of champions, worn for galavanting around the world in those newfangled jet planes, or perfecting one's swing on the golf course. These clothes were as glamorous as they were cosy, personified by Joanna Lumley modelling for Pringle.

Now, as many Scots embrace Primark and its ultra-cheap high street chain chums with an enthusiasm that can border on mania, Inventors Of Tradition looks back at the Scottish textile industry's glory days. They were glorious: Pringle and Ballantyne were at the top of their game, everyone from Jean Muir to M&S sourced their knitwear from the Borders mills, and the Singer sewing machine factory employed 11,000 in pre-war Clydebank.

The exhibition brings together archive visuals, publicity material, interviews with a diverse range of players, from Pringle's former head of design, Wallace Shaw, to playwright, artist and former Slab Boy John Byrne, to take an idiosyncratic look at the industry from the 1930s to the present.

"It's not a linear survey, it's subjective and personal," says curator Catriona Duffy, one of the two-woman team, Panel, behind the exhibition. "We wanted to look at everything from the promotion to the processes, remind people what a big business textile manufacturing was. We were fascinated to find out how, through the industry, Scotland promoted itself, and to see how that carries on today, with companies like Pringle stressing their Scottish roots."

Inventors Of Tradition is the first event to come out of Creative Scotland's Vital Spark initiative, and Panel's curatorial debut. Duffy and Lucy McEachan both worked at The Lighthouse, Glasgow's now defunct design museum, and after its demise took their contact book and experience into their own enterprise. It has served them brilliantly: they have invited two former Lighthouse associates, fashion designer Beca Lipscombe and artist Lucy McKenzie, to contribute contemporary clothing manufactured in Scotland, to throw the ideas of the exhibition forward into the 21st century.

Lipscombe and McKenzie, who work together as interior design company Atelier as well as doing their own highly-regarded work, were, says McEachan, an obvious match. The way they work with craft and traditional skills, with everything handmade, made them a perfect fit.

Atelier share the curators' interest in looking beyond the obvious. Lipscombe lives and works in Edinburgh while McKenzie, who is from Kirkintilloch and studied at Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee, has shown at the Saatchi Gallery, Tate Britain and MoMA in New York among others, is based in Brussels.

"It's not that we are particularly interested in industrial design, but we have a passion for Scottish textiles and fashion," says McKenzie. This has allowed Beca and me to explore some of our obsessions, such as M&S pulling out of Scotland and the death of Scottish textile production."

Their starting point, in creating a mini-collection for the exhibition, was to ask: what can you actually manufacture in Scotland today? Is it possible to make a cagoule, an anorak, a pair of socks? Turns out the answer is yes, if you know who to ask, and the pair have worked with the best of the textile firms still standing – Hawick Cashmere, Mackintosh, Caerlee Mills – to create a selection of garments that speak to their own individual enthusiasms.

McKenzie is particularly interested in artists' work coats. To the untrained eye these are closely related to the dung-coloured coveralls worn by sit-com janitors and factory foremen. She is convinced, however, that they are a garment with a great future.

"I've been wearing them for several years, as a rejection of the slacker idea that you slop around in a sweatshirt and jeans covered in paint. We wore them at Ecole Van Der Kelen-Logelain" – the Belgian academy where McKenzie has been studying 19th-century specialist paintwork techniques – as a symbol of self-respect and pride in our work."

One of her teachers, who she describes as the Coco Chanel of decorative paintwork, worked the look with particular aplomb. She had beautifully-made work coats, made to her own design, and she would wear them over her prim blouse, skirt and high heels. She had her hair in a bun, that she stuck paintbrushes in.

Not that the work coats in the show will be straight lifts of anyone else's. McKenzie, determined to fuse form, function and fabric as well as look fabulous, has been drawing prototypes, test-driving samples and quizzing everyone she encounters about their preferred painting garment. There is history – painters are traditionally photographed in paint-spattered smocks. Lucien Freud, apparently, makes his own aprons.

"Everyone," says McKenzie, "wants something stylish, cheap and durable. And it means you can wear something nice underneath."

The production of the prototype work coats – these are definitely not overalls – has fallen to Steven Purvis, a Glasgow tailor who dresses many of the city's most meticulously suited and booted gentlemen, and who also moonlights as a costume-maker for Scottish Opera. He has been making clothes for McKenzie for years and has also taken on an unofficial role as her fabric historian.

"He has been a big influence," she says. "I can take him any old work coat I've found in a second-hand shop. He will examine it, look at the seams, date it to within ten years. He can unpick the processes of making it and tell me, 'We can do this, we can't do that.'"

For those of us who don't need paintbrush pockets, the work coats will also be cut down and recreated as jackets, in luxe fabrics. There will also be three hats, another McKenzie trademark, made in conjunction with Mhlbauer, an Austrian millinery company that has been run by the same family since 1903. There will be a flat Spanish hat with an angora hood, a black silk headscarf and one McKenzie describes as a modern take on a Victorian bonnet.

On what occasion would one wear a modern take on a Victorian bonnet? "I would wear it any time. I would wear it to the chip shop. It's not going to make you feel like Little Bo Peep, with an enormous bow," McKenzie says.

Running through the Atelier collection is the idea of appropriate dressing, the kind of clothes women who worked in the textile mills would have worn to go out and do a skilled job of work. So there are two macs – the real deal, made by Mackintosh – and printed cashmere scarves. Not a scrap of Lycra, a skimpy rayon frock or a hot pant in sight.

Instead McKenzie and Lipscombe have tried to pin down an aesthetic they find sadly lacking today. "The hats are part of a proper antiquated look," McKenzie says, "the idea of being polished. Now all women wear Ugg boots or high heels, with nothing in between. There is none of that modesty, that way of dressing that says, 'I work with my hands, I'm not on display.'"

This desire to create clothes that say more than "here it is" extends to the way the collection will be shown at the exhibition and in the look book that will accompany it. "We want to present the clothes in ways we feel comfortable with, so there are drawings and mannequins. We want to find the kind of women John Byrne puts in his plays, who have a kind of provincial stylishness."

Besides being defiantly demure, the Atelier collection is genuinely Scottish. McKenzie is scathing of the likes of Pringle – Sunday name Pringle of Scotland – which makes a big fuss about its heritage and roots while quietly moving manufacturing elsewhere. "I think that's artwash," she suggests, "using Scottish artists such as David Shrigley (who made a film, artwork and a shop window for the company] and Tilda (Swinton, the actress who is the official face of the company's menswear and womenswear collections]. But they are just poster people."

Lipscombe, however, has chosen to keep everything in Scotland. McKenzie says she has had to sit and watch while people she was at college with go to work at Celine and Burberry. But she has not succumbed.

Working on the Atelier collection has, however, softened her views on companies that source their manufacturing overseas. "I used to be very black and white on that. But I've seen the conditions these companies work under. This country has not invested in technology and other countries, such as India and China, have. We visited factories where people were sitting working in a tiny wee corner of what was once a glorious industry."

She and Lipscombe will be making their contribution to keeping the factories running by, after the Inventors Of Tradition show closes at the end of February, showing the collection in New York, Berlin, London and several other cities, "if we have the energy". McKenzie is also discussing the work coats with several high-end art stores.

This is all very much what the curators hoped for when they dreamed up Inventors Of Tradition. "We wanted to avoid too much nostalgia, With so much production moving to the Far East, we wanted to show that this is still a relevant subject."

To put the exhibits in context, Panel have taken over a disused grocery shop – the former Henry Healy at 21 Stockwell Street – and transformed it into a museum space. "We liked the parallel between a shopping experience and an exhibition about fashion, says Duffy. "We wanted to push that. Anyone might walk in."

Stockwell Street, on the western edge of the Merchant City, is somewhere between what the city's marketeers optimistically call The Style Mile and the gallery-tattoo-parlour-vegan-restaurant heavy area they have decided is The Cultural Quarter. It's also a bonnet's throw away from Glassford Street, where The Warehouse, between 1978 and 1994, brought a hint of the avant garde fashion of London, Tokyo and Antwerp to drab, post-industrial Glasgow.

Although The Warehouse was not a manufacturer, the curators wanted to include it in the exhibition because it was visionary and bold at a time when everyone else was cautious and mainstream. It was part of the re-imagining of the city, helping to reinvigorate Glasgow. It is part of the reason the city has become a Mecca for shopping. It was also a powerful presence to any style-obsessed youngster growing up in Scotland. Lipscombe remembers going there as a teenager.

Mullane, the retail brains behind the Warehouse, has contributed precious photographs and memories to Inventors Of Tradition. In fact, everyone Duffy and McEachan asked excavated their attics and produced treasures from the back of drawers. "This is not an exhibition that has come from museum archives," says McEachan. "When we started to ask people who had been involved with the industry we were overwhelmed by their generosity.

"As Scottish style becomes a marketable commodity again, this is a good time to see what can be learned from the past. These companies were creating a global brand. They were using Scotland to sell their clothes, the idea of it, the glamour of it. It was the fact that it was made in Scotland that gave it its quality and there are not many brands that can simply use their quality as their selling point." n

The Inventors Of Tradition, 21 Stockwell Street, Glasgow, from Saturday until 26 February, www.wearepanel.co.uk

• This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on January 16, 2011