Quote Originally Posted by EagleJCS View Post
I was actually trying to comment more on the (mis-?)use of the term "piper's sporran" in describing the horsehair sporran.

The horsehair sporran... is considered a military-style sporran...

Granted, the goathair sporran is civilian, but it looks vastly different from the horsehair sporran.
On the first point above, I certainly agree! It's absurd to call a horsehair sporran a "piper's sporran" when all ranks of the Highland regiments wear them.

About the horsehair sporran being considered a military style, that's what I used to think back when I first got involved in Highland dress in the 1970's.
Highland dress at that time was neatly sorted into civilian day dress, civiliarn evening dress, and military full dress, each with its proprietary jacket, sporran, and footwear.

The eye-opener came when I aquired a copy of The Highlanders of Scotland, a series of extremely detailed portraits of men in Highland dress painted in the 1860's. At that time, it was clear, long hair sporrans were universally worn with all modes of Highland dress: with informal tweed kilt jackets, with the more formal "Celtic" jackets, and with jackets somewhat analagous to our our modern evening dress jackets. A book I have which was probably published around 1914 shows that this was still the case at that time. So, the neat division of sporrans into evening, day, and military seems not to have happened until the 1920's or so.

About horsehair sporrans and goathair sporrans looking different, actually it's often difficult to tell one from the other in old photographs.