Photo Credit Photo illustration by Maurico Alejo
The paparazzi must be pleased with the vogue for buffalo plaid — with all the acres of fabric, deep red and black thickly crisscrossing, marking their quarry clearly. Have you recently breezed through the celebrity-photo pages? Reese Witherspoon snapped, leaving her car in a parking lot, while wearing a buffalo-plaid shirt and a smart skirt. Gwen Stefani, spotted toting her toddler to church, has bundled the boy in a logger shirt. Here we have Kylie Jenner — that ''Keeping Up With the Kardashians'' fixture — in a buffalo-plaid shirtdress of shocking blue. Pictures of the dress stimulated such demand that its manufacturer rushed it back into production.
The pattern's phenomenal popularity is a bit like that of the Kardashians themselves. Presumed at the beginning of the decade to be enjoying a passing moment in the public eye, each instead emerged as a mass-culture institution. Buffalo plaid was cool, and then it was a thing. Then it was too cool for too long and spread into a basic feature of the landscape. Now it simply is. Go to the park and witness the logger lady wearing the hunting jacket out with her lumber-bro husband in his barn coat and their little lumber-lad cherub in a trapper hat.
Continue reading the main story Slide Show An Evolving Pattern
CreditFine Art Photographic Library/Corbis
But in the course of seeming timeless, the pattern crossed its signals. Buffalo plaid, once the uncomplicated icon of woodsy masculinity, is now a bit of a camp classic. Its redefinition as something universal and unisex has the flavor of an accidental subversion.
Buffalo plaid emulates a pattern, or ''sett,'' that the Scottish Register of Tartans calls Rob Roy Macgregor. Bold and primitive, it entered the record of design in 1704 and evolved in a context where the politics of style were matters of war. The Jacobite rising of 1745 — wherein Charles Edward Stuart started a failed invasion of England in pursuit of the throne — led Britain's Parliament to ban men and boys in Scotland from wearing tartans for 36 years. In turn, Scotland attested the nobility of its plaids in songs, paintings, fraudulent documents and the Sir Walter Scott novel ''Rob Roy'' (1817), with its folk-heroic portrait of an outlaw.
There is today a small American outdoors clothier — BraeVal, based in Litchfield, Conn., up near quality pheasant hunting — whose founder claims descent from the figure who brought the Rob Roy tartan to these shores. Supposedly, that ancestor, a Montana rancher named Big Jock McCluskey, bartered with Native Americans, trading blankets and shirts for buffalo pelts. A competing origin myth holds that around 1850 a textile designer at the Woolrich mill in Pennsylvania named his Rob Roy imitation after the herd of bison he tended off the clock. Each story conjures the romance of the frontier myth, linking the name of the pattern to the majesty of a wilderness rip e for spoiling, as if to hint that its squares were manifestly destined as building blocks of Americana.
Out of one continental vision, many local traditions — the Maine Guide Shirt of L.L. Bean, the Mackinaw coats of the upper Great Lakes, the jackets of Pendleton Woolen Mills in Oregon. Buffalo plaid flourished wherever Paul Bunyan trod. In the middle of the 20th century, having conquered a segment of rural iconography, it settled down in the suburbs. It wasn't cool — it was, in its corner of the Sears catalog, the opposite of a thing — but it was a cheerful option for the rugged individualist proudly raking his Levittown lawn. One manufacturer touted buffalo plaid as the pattern of ''a truly friendly shirt,'' arresting the eye to lift a paternal wave.
In the 1980s, it matured into a style item by appealing to a taste for cultural conservatism, deploying wholesome charm to soothe consumers yearning for the stability of convention. The Gap produced buffalo-plaid shirts in the familiar intense red but also strontium yellow and saturated green and high-beam-indicator blue, any of which suited such all-American activities as attending football games, watching TV and hanging out at the mall where you bought it. But the traditional red — a scarlet sturdy as brick and bright as alarm bells — was necessary to attempt the mood of the ''prairie collections'' by Ralph Lauren, that unparalleled retailer of false nostalgia. In one ad from the 1980s, Lauren's well-scrubbed model wears a buffalo-plaid skirt that flounces at the middle of a calf clad in floral tights and a flecked sock. She has an imitation of a Norwegian sweater and a simulacrum of Scottish dancing shoes and a gentle way of excitin g fantasies of propriety and prosperity.
This regal mode of rustic preppy costume endures wherever buffalo plaid makes an appearance on a man wearing a capacious scarf as if repurposing a throw found on a sofa in his lake house. Or on a woman with the bearing of a lady returned from a pheasant hunt. By now, there is no contradiction in such elite creatures draping themselves in cloth valued as populist. Surely, the elevation of this log-cabin pattern to the manor house was a prerequisite of its phenomenal fame; I am reminded that jeans first entered the orbit of glamour by way of the dude-ranch vacation.
Suffused with fables now, including its myth as a mantle of authenticity, buffalo plaid becomes heavy with irony, and its machismo gives way to theatrical gender play.The nuances of tomboyish performance that distinguish a woman wearing a ''boyfriend flannel shirt'' from one wearing her boyfriend's flannel shirt can tend toward the meaningfully microscopic. The low-cut buffalo-print top of a waitress at Twin Peaks — a Texas-based restaurant chain that, in a typically juvenile double entendre, describes its every dining room as a ''mountain-lodge getaway'' — positions her bosom as décor and defines her cleavage as a male space. And while she may be a prop, her customers, when butched up to a brawny extreme, perhaps resemble male drag kings.
The ''lumbersexual'' is a figure bestriding recent literature from the lifestyle coverage of the Sundance Film Festival to academic papers analyzing the narrative of the zeitgeist. Considered as a consumer, his natural habitat is a men's shop decorated with elegant axes — the sort of place where a customer, proceeding to the register with his four-figure parka, evaluates impulse purchases including handmade lanyards and flask bottles of beard oil. Buffalo plaid is the linchpin of the existence of a social type. This fellow somehow remains a viable mode of masculine cool, despite having passed his rational expiration date. He is hunkering down for a while, waiting to see how things shake out with gender fluidity and patriarchal decline.
I won't begrudge him for treating his lumberjack shirt like a safety blanket. He and it are the beneficiaries of the popular turn toward heritage brands and their attendant values. Clothiers founded in the 19th century as purveyors of unpretentious dry goods are thriving by satisfying the pretenses of the 21st. The shirt offers the shelter of an anti-chic, protecting against the assault of novelty. Fashion-forward civilians keep looking backward, conservative and conservationist, not without amusing consequences, like a handmade buffalo-plaid Mason jar coozie seen on Etsy, photographed atop a coaster printed with owls, for a hat trick of twee signifiers. The pileup of preciousness neuters the pattern in much the same way that a pair of buffalo-plaid duck boots exists foremost as a camp object. Buffalo plaid can thrive under kitsch conditions — sentiment is its business — but such corniness risks wearing the security blanket threadbare.
In 1978, the Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander walked 1,000 miles across his state to promote his gubernatorial run. He wore a buffalo-plaid shirt, a costume so successful as a populist uniform that he made it a trademark of a career that included a 1996 presidential run and a 1998 advice manual titled, ''Lamar Alexander's Little Plaid Book.'' In 2013, a young political organizer posed for an ad encouraging young adults to talk up the Affordable Care Act while home for the winter holidays. He wore buffalo-plaid pajamas, and he entered public discourse infantilized as Pajama Boy, a man-child regarded warily even by his fellow liberals because his dainty mien opened the possibility that the pj's ended in footies. Alexander, like any prospective statesman, proposed himself as a steward of tradition. Pajama Boy, like many a lousy hipster, seems a connoisseur of vintage aesthetics. Both practiced a grass-roots politics of escapism, just like all the dudes and basic biddies wearing a logger jacket to play the Republic's favorite dress-up game. The clothes make the manliness they once symbolized seem like a fabrication from whole cloth.
