Art review: The Inventors of Tradition, Glasgow

Shoppers in Glasgow's Stockwell Street might be forgiven for a little confusion about the new premises that have appeared in the glass-fronted shop that once housed a branch of the grocery Henry Healy. What looks, on the face of it, like a new boutique, is part pop-up fashion store, part cinema, and part archival museum display.

• Clydebank Room Divider from Atelier

The Inventors of Tradition is an exhibition that charts, in a personal and deeply subjective style, the history of the Scottish textile industry and the connections between art and fashion, craft and manufacturing.

It's a collaboration between two collaborations: Atelier, consisting of the ever-inventive Brussels-based Scottish Artist Lucy McKenzie and the Edinburgh fashion designer Beca Lipscombe, and Glasgow curatorial team Panel who, are former Lighthouse staffers Lucy McEachan and Catriona Duffy.

In fact, the exhibition design is by another collaborating pair, who emerged from the Glasgow art scene: Julian Kildear and Rob Kennedy. If the whole thing sounds a little too much like an advert for Creative Scotland - creative industry types collaborating over cappuccinos - it's delightfully idiosyncratic and its notion of design is far more William Morris than Apple iPad. And, er, there is the fact that it is a Creative Scotland funded project, under the Vital Spark scheme aimed at just this kind cross-disciplinary thinking.

On the simplest level though, this is a show full of pleasures. Everything from a collection of archive photographs of a red-haired suburban sweater girl posing awkwardly in Barrie Knitwear, like an extra from Abigail's Party, to the unexpected frisson in discovering that the stern black British Rail uniform and the funky flamboyant Hermes overcoat hanging on a central rail in the show were both made by Mackintosh in Cumbernauld in the 70s.

There is a keen eye for detail, from a selection of documentaries on the Scottish textile industry dug out from the Scottish Screen Archive to the somewhat deadpan labels accompanying some personal wardrobe items lent by painter/writer/dandy and all round minence grise John Byrne. "Cross Hatch Jumper, Cotton, Bought in 2010 from the Thrift shop, Lothian road, Edinburgh. Reputed to be the oldest thrift shop in Scotland". Who can resist a man who takes his fashion so seriously he dates his charity shop purchases?

The Inventors of Tradition works because of this kind of nutty passion. As an artist, McKenzie has often seemed obsessed with certain forms of heritage, whether it's the romantic Scottish painting tradition handed down from the likes of Byrne, or her embrace of style from art nouveau design to underground musical or sartorial subcultures.

In Lipscombe she has found a collaborator with shared aesthetic interests and a wide-ranging technical and historical knowledge. The two have their own Atelier label and the capsule collection on show will become available later in 2011. If I was a fashion writer, I'm sure I'd find a way of describing its fusion of industrial heritage, post-industrial cheek, handcraft and gaucho-styled headwear. But as I'm not let's just say that their Paisley patterned coat is a perfect example of their attitude. The style is 80s retro and the rubberised textile and practical taped seams come courtesy of the Victorian heritage and hand-finishing of the Mackintosh factory.

What a project like this does best is to reveal in unexpected ways the astonishing story of the Scottish textile industry from Barrie to Bannatyne. There is the work of designer EY Johnston who, as well as the day job, made some pretty nifty gear for Maggie Smith as the notorious Miss Jean Brodie in her prime. There are cases devoted to the inimitable Jean Muir and the designer Bonnie Cashin, who was American but an honorary Scot for her contribution to the Scottish cashmere industry.

There is nothing glossy or corporate about the displays though, which are endearingly full of the hand drawn, the casually snapped and the ephemeral. There are fantastic loans charting the careers of individual designers including Glasgow School of Art's Robert Stewart and GSA graduate Wallace Shaw who became head of design at Pringle and later worked for Donna Karan. And there's a wonderfully rose-tinted look at The Warehouse, the Glassford Street fashion emporium which embodied all that was endearing, ambitious and a wee bit embarrassing about Glasgow style in the 1980s.

Of course, it is also a story of loss, as so many narratives - that of Singer, say, or Stoddard's carpets - end in closure of companies or the moving of production elsewhere. Hearteningly, Atelier works with some world-class survivors, including Mackintosh, Hawick Cashmere and Caerlee Mills. Similarly the demise of Glasgow's Lighthouse has left the architecture and design community seriously dented, but it's great to see some of its curatorial talent come out from the museum and on to the street. v

The Inventors of Tradition, 21 Stockwell Street, Glasgow, Tuesday to Saturday 11am-5pm, until 26 February

• This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on January 30, 2011