Scottish Tartans Authority
Scottish organization preserving tartans and Highland dress
The Scottish Tartans Authority (STA) is a Scottish registered charity dedicated to the promotion, protection and preservation of Scotland's national cloth. Founded in 1995, the charitable purposes of the Authority are:
to protect, preserve, conserve, promote and explain the culture, traditions and uses of Scottish Tartans and highland dress; and
to advance and promote the education of the public about Scottish Tartans and Highland Dress and their respective origins, manufacture, use and development.
With the assistance of members and stakeholders, the STA fields enquiries each year and works in partnership with, and as advisors to, a range of public and private bodies.
The STA holds a collection of tartan and highland dress, costume, textiles, tartan records, manuscripts, books, other important artefacts. It holds details of c. 10,000 tartans within its core database, and a number of items from the collection are on loan to various museums, notably National Museums Scotland, V&A Dundee, the Braemar Highland Games Centre, and the Gordon Highlanders Museum.
History
The authority was founded in 1995.
In November 2008, the Scottish Parliament passed the Scottish Register of Tartans Act and the Scottish Register of Tartans was launched in February 2009. At this point, the STA relinquished its registration responsibilities, having already gifted the contents of its core database to the National Records of Scotland to assist in the setting up of The Scottish Register of Tartans (SRT).
In 2017, the Scottish Tartans Authority gained the Royal Patronage of HRH The Prince Charles, Prince of Wales and Duke of Rothesay.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Scottish Tartans Authority” as scottish organization preserving tartans and Highland dress. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as scottish organization preserving tartans and Highland dress. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7437997. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1995, 2008, 2009 and 2017.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “Scottish Tartans Authority” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.