Belt Sizes and Styles

[Blaidd]

When you have found your preferred buckle, you can find various belt blanks on ebay, for example, of varying widths and finishes that are then easily made (with the most basic of DIY skills) into a nice belt.

[imbrius]

It's one of those matters where there are norms in Traditional Highland Dress, but many people nowadays (through not knowing about and/or not being concerned with those norms) wear things borrowed from Ren-Faire costume, pirate costume, re-enactor garb of any period, ordinary Saxon dress, and so forth.

This entire article is EXCELLENT. This is amazing, well-researched, well-documented, and extremely helpful. A better explanation of belt-wearing with kilts I could not have asked for. Bravo, good fellow!!

[OC Richard]

Thanks!

As far as currently available styles go, here's a photo from an Ebay listing which is pretty cool in showing so many different styles, old and new.



To the Highland Dress aficionado many of these have tales to tell.

All but two, as far as I know, are intended for the 20th century standard 2.25 inch wide civilian Evening Dress belt which was, as best I can tell, introduced c1920 in conjunction with the new "Montrose" Evening Dress jacket.

Top row L-R

1) new clip art.
2) "pattern #355" buckle for the wide 2.5 inch "pipers belt". There was a whole suite of #355 accoutrements including crossbelt hardware, shoe buckles, dirk, plaid brooch, etc.
3) and 4) new clip art, particularly crude.

Second row L-R

1-3) new clip art.
4) traditional "Runic" Evening Dress style dating back at least to the 1950s.

Third row L-R

1-4) new clip art but 3) is far better-executed than most.

Fourth row L-R

1) new design that appears to be specially made for the buckle rather than clip art. There's a matching sporran cantle too.
2) this design has a well-executed specially-made traditional look to it.
3) the standard 20th century civilian "Runic" Evening Dress buckle.
4) the standard 20th century civilian "Thistle" Evening Dress buckle.

Fifth row L-R

1) and 2) exceptionally crude clip-art designs.
3) traditional "pattern #102" large buckle for the 2.5 inch "pipers belt".
4) this appears to be a special-made design though somewhat crude; probably merely modified clip art.

Now what do I mean by "clip art"?

It's the bane of graphic design and product design in the computer age.

In the old days if you wanted a buckle design an artist/jeweler would sculpt an original design, specially made to fit the format.

Nowadays people grab pre-existing designs off the internet, change their size and orientation on a computer graphics program, and shove them into the format. The results rarely have the elegance and balance and relationship to format of original designs.

With Scottish buckles this can be seen with knotwork borders. The traditional "runic" Evening Dress buckle had the knotwork specially designed to fit the long and short sides of the buckle (Row Four number 3 and Row Two number 4).

Clip art buckles have the knotwork chopped to fit (Row One number 1 and Row Two number 2) or have something else superimposed over it (Row Three number 3) or has been squeezed or stretched by the computer program to fit (also Row Three number 3).

Also with thistle designs, notice that both of the thistle-pattern big "pipers belt" designs #355 and #102 were specially made designs to fit the format of the belt (Row One number 2 and Row Five number 3) and that likewise the traditional Evening Dress thistle buckle (Row Four number 4) had specially designed thistles for the short and long sides of the buckle.

BTW most of the Celtic knotwork clip art has been lifted (without acknowledgement) from Baines.

Here's the old tri-fold brochure of sporran styles used by numerous firms for decades in the second half of the 20th century showing the large piper's buckles #355 with rectangular opening and #102 with oval opening. The crossbelt is #102.