Description
The oldest known occurrence of houndstooth is the Gerum Cloak, a garment uncovered in a Swedish peat bog, dated to between 360 and 100 BC. Contemporary houndstooth checks may have originated as a pattern in woven tweed cloth from the Scottish Lowlands, but are now used in many other woven fabric aside from wool. The traditional houndstooth check is made with alternating bands of four dark and four light threads in both warp and weft/filling woven in a simple 2:2 twill, two over/two under the warp, advancing one thread each pass. In an early reference to houndstooth, De Pinna, a New York City–based men’s and women’s high-end clothier founded in 1885, included houndstooth checks along with gun club checks and Scotch plaids as part of its 1933 spring men’s suits collection. The actual term houndstooth for the pattern is not recorded before 1936.
