A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY CURRENT TWEED OBSESSION

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INTO MY PINTEREST FIND

I was spending my Sunday evening as most of us girls do doom scrolling my Pinterest feed, when I came across a tweed jacket that immediately stopped me.

IMAGES VIA @pienbolk

It was one of the saves that quickly becomes ten. A cropped jacket led to an old Chanel suit, which led to Claudia Schiffer on a runway in the 90s and I quickly realised I knew exactly what tweed looked like without knowing all that much about where it actually came from.

THE ORIGIN OF TWEED

A little digging took me much further back than Chanel. Tweed began as a practical woollen cloth in Scotland, where its warmth and durability made out to be particularly useful for country and outdoor clothing. Tweed wasn’t originally called Tweed. The story goes that Tweed was originally called Tweel, the Scots word for Twill, until a London merchant misread the word as “tweed” sometime around the 1830s, possibly assuming it had something to do with the river Tweed. Historians have debated whether that’s exactly how it happened but somewhere along the way tweed was the name that stuck.

IMAGES VIA https://www.harristweed.org/

Harris Tweed is slightly different again and something I hadn’t realised before researching this. Genuine Harris tweed has a legally protected definition: It must be handwoven by islanders at their homes in the Outer Hebrides, finished there and made from pure virgin wool dyed and spun there. If you ever noticed the little orb mark on a Harris Tweed piece, that certification that it has been made according to those requirements.

THEN CHANEL GOT HER HANDS ON IT

The leap from practical Scottish cloth to one of the most recognisable fabrics in fashion has a lot to do with Gabrielle Chanel. During the 1920s, her relationship with the Duke of Westminster brought her into the world of British country dressing, where Tweed was part of menswear sporting wardrobes and the clothes worn on Scottish estates. Chanel began working the fabric into her own collections, but the jacket we immediately associate with the house today really took shape after she returned to fashion in 1954.

Her version was much softer than traditional women’s tailoring. Rather than building a stiff jacket around the body, Chanel wanted something women could actually move in and some of the details that came out of that are still used by the house today. The silk lining, braid, gilt buttons and my favourite a fine chain sewn around the inside hem to give the lightweight jacket enough weight to hang properly. I had never really thought about what was happening inside a Chanel jacket before, but I love that something designed to look so effortless has a tiny metal chain to ensure it sits exactly as intended.

By the end of the 50s and into the 60s, women including Lauren Bacall, Grace Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor were wearing Chanel tweed. One of the archive pieces I kept coming back to was Bacall’s rose pink suit from 1959, complete with gilded loin head buttons. It has everything we now immediately associate with Chanel but without looking like the slightly exaggerated “Chanel Inspired” version of tweed that has since made its way into every corner of fashion.

FAVOURITE MOMENTS OF TWEED THROUGHOUT THE YEARS

Once I started looking through the archives, I very quickly had favourites. Chanel obviously appears more than once, it would be almost impossible to talk about tweed without it but I love seeing how differently fabric has been worn depending on the decade.

LAUREN BACALL IN CHANEL, 1959

Lauren Bacall’s rose pink Chanel suit is probably the best place to start. The jacket has the details that would become Chanel signatures, braided trim, gilded loin head buttons and that soft, straight silhouette with a matching skirt and blouse underneath. It’s a beautiful example of what Gabrielle Chanel was doing with tweed at the time, before decades of reinterpretations made the jacket feel as similar as it does now.

PRINCESS DIANAIN CHANEL, 1997

The powder blue Chanel suit Diana worse in London ins 1997 is one of my favourites from her wardrobe. It’s much more traditional than the tiny tweed looks Chanel was simultaneously sending down the runway in the 90s. A longer jacker, matching knee length skirt and those unmistakable Chanel buttons. On Diana, though it doesn’t feel old fashioned. It’s also a good reminder that while Karl Lagerfeld was busy pulling Chanel tweed apart on the runway, the classic suit was still being worn.

CLAUDIA SCHIFFER FOR CHANEL, SPRING/SUMMER 1994

If the original Chanel suit explains why tweed became a fashion staples, Claudia shifter in the 90s Chanel probably explains why I want to wear it now. Lagerfeld shortened everything, piled on the jewellery and out the houses very proper fabrics on the supers. The spring/summer 1994 collections are particularly good. Tiny skirts cropped jackets, bare legs, gold chains and Claudia right in the middle of it. So many of the tweed outfits filling Pinterest right now feel like descendants of this era.

CHANEL FALL 1991

For fall 1991, Chanel paired pink tweed jackets with frayed denim minis, white t shirts, oversized belts and layers of gold jewellery. It’s one of my favourite versions of Chanel tweed because it feels so far removed from the matching skirt suit it started as. The jacket is unmistakably Chanel but with denim and a t-shirt undercoating it’s much closer to how I would wear one now.

CHANEL UNDER MATTHIEU BLAZE, FALL 2026

And then we get to now. For fall 2026, Matthieu Blaze played with the idea of tweed itself including pieces that appeared to be tweed but were created through trompe-l'œil effects and printed chainmail. After nearly a century of Chanel reworking the same fabric, I like that one of its newest interpretations isn’t necessarily tweed at all.