Friday, November 7, 2008

Tattersall for the Hunt




A tattersall is a regularly spaced plaid, usually a 1/2" rectangle that's a little taller than it is wide, combining two dark colored lines on a light ground. The pattern was named after Tattersall's, a London horse market founded in 1766 where blankets with the design were in common use.


Two hundred and fifty years later, the tattersall waistcoat remains a standard part of a man's formal and informal hunt garb, when foxes are the prey of the day. So tattersall worn under a tweed hacking jacket can come in handy for men who are or who wish to appear as if they are on speaking terms with a horse - even if the horse in question is one of the police mounts that are ridden around New York's Central Park. For the horse ranks higher than the dog in the hierarchy of costly pets, and where there are horses, there are females who dote on them.

That makes a tattersall waistcoat useful for more than one kind of hunting.

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