black shoes brown sporran

[OC Richard]

The topic of matching leathers in Highland Day Dress has come up many times.

Since I closed my Photobucket account my old threads are probably photo-less, so I'll post this thread with working photos.

When I started kiltwearing in the 1970s I saw most men wearing black shoes and brown sporrans.

I didn't question it. I didn't try to apply the rules of non-Highland clothing. I didn't do the Yankee Ingenuity thing of disregarding Old World ways and re-imagining Highland Dress to suit my own logic. As an outsider I felt the best thing to do was to become a tabla rasa and accept what I saw, just as I would if learning a foreign language or what have you.

Many years later, after getting every book I could on the history of Highland Dress and more recently acquiring a number of vintage Highland Dress catalogues, I have added perspective on this issue (and many others!)

So where did the brown sporran black shoe thing come from?

It goes way back to our earliest clear images of men in Highland Dress. They show sporrans in soft light brown leather (deerskin?) and black shoes.

Here in 1700:



1714:



Here c1750:



In the second half of the 18th century it became the fashion to make sporrans out of sealskin, and the classic brown early 18th century sporran became a thing of the past.

The sealskin sporran of the late 18th century gave way to the hair sporran of the 19th century. Leather still might appear on the sporran, on the cantle or on the cones.

Here in the mid-19th century we see brown Ghillies worn with black belts (the sporran is fur with no exposed leather)



And another image of brown Ghillies worn with black belts, and in this case black leather sporran fittings. Ghillies, in these Highlanders Of Scotland paintings, are usually rough brown leather and have the feel of a rustic shoe



Yet here is a fellow with all matching brown leather:



Interesting is this fellow with black shoes and brown leather sporran fittings:



Around 1900 Highland Dress underwent a major transformation and long hair sporrans became unfashionable. They were replaced by a suite of new small pocket-shaped sporrans, in brown leather (sometimes with fur added) for Day Dress and in sealskin with silver cantle for Evening Dress.

Here, in 1926, only brown Day sporrans are offered:



and only black shoes are offered- it even states that black shoes are "correct" for Day Dress (they use "correct" quite a bit, back then). Since only brown Day Dress sporrans are offered, the assumption is black shoes worn with brown sporrans.



In the army, these small modern leather Day sporrans were adopted in the early 20th century and are still issued today. They have always been brown (varying from mid-brown to dark brown) and are worn with black shoes



In looking over 300 years of civilian and military Highland Dress it's apparent that having the leathers match rarely (if ever) crossed anyone's mind.