To plaid or not to plaid.....thats the question??

[OC Richard]

If I may, a word of warning about using these pictures as examples of what to wear with Highland attire. These wonderfully constructed pictures were arranged as eye candy during the height of the romantic and wealthy Victorian love affair with the Highlands of Scotland, by a skilled, but commercially minded artist. Please do not regard the subject matter in the pictures as any general guide to Highland attire for the masses.These subjects are at best, if you like, wearing Sunday best and are more likely to have been dressed from the local Laird's wardrobe.

True that many of the subjects were kitted out by their Clan Chiefs in outrageous finery for these portraits (The Highlanders of Scotland, commissioned by Queen Victoria) and can't be used as a guide to ordinary Highland Dress of the period.

However many of the subjects are in absolutely plain attire, without a bit of metal, lacking things we take for granted today such as cap badges, flashes, and kilt pins, wearing ordinary outdoor hightopped working boots, utterly plain jackets which wouldn't be considered appropriate for kiltwearing today due to their ordinary cut, and so forth. This is as plain and workmanlike as Highland Dress can get, and is backed up by a vast number of contemporary photos showing exactly the same dress.

Back to the topic of fly plaids, as far as I can tell these are a quite recent invention, the plain square of fringed tartan that's pinned at the shoulder and simply hangs down.

What has been around since c1800 is what was called the 'belted plaid' (not the great kilt of the 18th century) which is a complex expensive rather heavy tailored garment that has a belt that buckles around the waist and a mass of fringed pleated tartan that goes up and has a sewn-in tab that's pinned at the shoulder. It was adopted by the kilted Highland regiments to simulate the appearance of the great kilt when that garment was abolished c1800, and it's been worn in civilian Evening Dress as well ever since.

Here's a thread where the 'belted plaid' is explained and Steve posts detailed photos showing its construction

http://www.xmarksthescot.com/forum/f...79/index3.html

The wearing of plaids with civilian Evening Dress was pretty much out of style by the 1920s when Highland Evening Dress underwent simplification and the oldfashioned wearing of dirks, swords, dirkbelts, swordbelts, plaids, brooches, and even a pair of all-steel Highland pistols became passe. The new look was simple, clean, and elegant. Not to say that people still didn't wear belted plaids (not the great kilt type) sometimes, they did, but not as often as previously.

The very height of late Victorian Highland Evening Dress



the clean elegant simplicity of Evening Dress of the 1920s and 1930s



the ordinary Highland Dress of the 1860s and 1870s, precisely as appears in The Highlanders of Scotland