early kilts with pleats in front?

[Pleater]

I make all sorts of different garments, I made English smocks long before I started sewing kilts.

The design of smocks, doublets and other old types of garments had folds, pleats or cartridge style gathers both front and back. It is the modern kilt with pleats only in the back which is the oddity or perhaps innovation is a kinder description.

Fleas and lice used to find those arrangements convenient places to hide, even able to survive washing, particularly in the folds of oiled work smocks.

I remember being told of the way girls would be required to assist in doing the laundry by taking a darning needle and going over garments squashing or dislodging such pests. My grandmothers were Victorians.

Being able to release a cord, brush off the offending beasties and then gather it up again would have saved an awful lot of botheration.

Anne the Pleater