Colour has been a key element within the design of tweeds from the 1830s up until today. This paper focuses on interdisciplinary and material culture research about early tweed design, which shows that novel ways of using colour in woollen textile design evolved from the 1830s in Scotland. In that period, many of what became the key visual characteristics of the ‘family’ of textiles known as tweeds developed. The historical and international significance of these colour and design developments is shown by the continued popularity of tweeds within men’s and women’s fashion since the mid-nineteenth century. The paper explores the influence of Romanticism, landscape, sport, fashion and gender on the development of the newly colourful Scottish woollen designs, which by the 1830s had become known as tweeds. It also investigates how fashionable London male consumers, Edinburgh and London merchants and Scottish woollen manufacturers had a significant impact on the design evolution of these cloths. The scant published research on Euro-American men’s fashion textiles of the nineteenth century has primarily focused on English broadcloths in black, or other dark colours. Investigating the use of colour in early tweed design therefore provides significant new perspectives about the social and cultural meanings of menswear woollens within the late Romantic era and beyond.