What is Queer Tartan?

Queer Tartan is made up of flat, digitally created 3D crystal bead shapes wrapped in tartan. They can be used for textile design, print graphics, animation, large scale murals, or used like beads or sequins to form pictures.

As you can see on the right, they work well together even though each one is very different and made of clashing colours. This is a nice metaphor for diversity.

When Fritha was a teenager, she spent some time in the Middle East and took a class on diversity and inclusion. Groups of people were given a pile of Lego to go and build something. The Lego was all divided by colour — Group A had blue Lego, Group B had red Lego, and so on. Fritha was in a group with green Lego. She had to take one piece of her green Lego to another group who were working with yellow Lego. People reacted strangely to this new Lego piece, sometimes strongly — suggesting there wasn’t a place for her piece. As a young adult, that experience made a big impact. This project is inspired by this.

Due to the rapid growth of AI image scraping and reuse, Fritha no longer distributes digital assets. The work now lives in objects, textiles, and collaborations, where context, authorship, and care can be maintained. If you would like to collaborate on a project, please get in touch.

Everyone who commissions a Queer Tartan design for a product like a cushion or a fabric is invited to be included in the Queer Tartan Register.

The Queer Tartan Register began as a joke — a playful response to the Scottish Register of Tartans, a government-run body that officially “registers” tartans for individuals and institutions, including global elites and the British royal family.
Given tartan’s origins as a 19th-century invention and marketing exercise, this formality felt ripe for gentle satire. Queer culture has always poked fun at the establishment through eg ballroom (debutant balls), Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World etc.

Hopefully, over time we can embed queer inclusivity everywhere. Fritha’s crazy dream was to design a Queer Tartan for every business in the UK. As Lady Gaga says “being gay is like glitter, it never goes away.” Queer Tartan makes that dream possible.

Queer Tartan is a visual language built from flat, digitally created 3D crystal bead shapes wrapped in tartan. These bead forms can be used in textile design, print graphics, animation, large-scale murals, or assembled like sequins to form images and patterns.

Although each bead is distinct — often clashing in colour and texture — they sit comfortably together. This is both a formal quality of the work and a metaphor for diversity: difference does not require sameness to belong.

The project is informed by an early experience that stayed with Fritha Lewin. As a teenager living in the Middle East, she took part in a diversity exercise where groups were asked to build structures using Lego sorted by colour. Each group was given only one colour of Lego. Fritha’s group had green. She was asked to take a single green piece to another group working in yellow. The reactions to this small intervention — confusion, resistance, discomfort — revealed how strongly systems can reject difference, even when it is harmless or generative. That moment left a lasting impression, and Queer Tartan is, in part, a response to it.

In light of the rapid growth of AI image scraping and reuse, Queer Tartan is no longer distributed as free digital assets. The work now lives primarily in objects, textiles, environments, and collaborations, where context, authorship, and care can be maintained. If you would like to collaborate on a project, you are warmly invited to get in touch.

Anyone who commissions a Queer Tartan design — for example as a cushion, fabric, or site-specific work — may be invited to have that tartan included in the Queer Tartan Register.

The Queer Tartan Register itself began as a joke: a playful response to the Scottish Register of Tartans, a government-run body that formally registers tartans for individuals and institutions, including global elites and the British royal family. Given tartan’s origins as a 19th-century invention and marketing exercise, this formality felt ripe for gentle satire. Queer culture has long used humour, glamour, and parody to poke at the establishment — from ballroom culture’s reinvention of debutante rituals to Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World. Our version is incomplete by design and grows according to feral instinct rather than rules.

At heart, Queer Tartan is optimistic. It imagines a world where queer inclusivity is so ordinary it barely needs explanation. Fritha’s early, slightly unhinged dream was to design a Queer Tartan for every business in the UK. As Lady Gaga famously said, “Being gay is like glitter — it never goes away.” Queer Tartan offers one small, joyful way of letting that glitter get into everyone’s knickers.