Formal Sporran with Tweed Argyll

[OC Richard]

It's a topic with a number of different compartments.

First is to recognise that civilian Highland Dress has various periods, each consisting of several decades of stability followed by a short period of rapid change. We're in the middle of one of the latter as we speak, so somebody getting their introduction to Highland Dress at this point in time is presented with a quite messy picture.

I'll call the Highland Dress of c1840 to c1900 Victorian Civilian Highland Dress for lack of a better term.

In this period long hair sporrans were worn in both informal outdoor/day dress with tweed and in formal evening dress.

Though VCHD tended to have a looser demarcation between day and evening, one does note that the day/outdoor/tweed sporrans tend to be of brown-grey hair with plain leather cantles, often with no metal, while the evening/formal sporrans were usually white hair with silver cantles.

Also popular in VCHD day/tweed outfits were Pine Marten sporrans.

So yes in Victorian times hair sporrans were worn with tweed but no these were generally not "formal" sporrans as these two sorts of sporrans existed then.

Then between around WWI VCHD was rather rapidly replaced by the Traditional Civilian Highland Dress which is still with us today.

Around WWI two new sporran genres appeared, both small and rounded:

Day Dress (outdoor/tweed): brown leather, often with fur fronts

Evening Dress: seal with silver cantles. However the long hair Victorian evening sporrans, though not as common, have continued to be worn to this day.

So yes throughout the TCHD period (roughly 1920 to the present) some men, especially pipers, have worn the modern 20th century small rounded seal & silver evening dress sporrans with day tweed, though this has never been considered proper, strictly speaking, due to day dress having its own dedicated sporran genre.

Nowadays who can say! TCHD has been battered (but not yet defeated) by the appearance and rise of Kilt Hire Highland Dress which started to have an impact starting in the 1980s and whose impact seems to steadily grow.

KHHD introduced the ubiquitous costume consisting of the black Prince Charlie coatee, black leather "semi dress" sporran with silver fitments, pure white hose, and high-laced black Ghillie brogues, everything designed to be less expensive and in black and white to easier to hire together.

KHHD has also been keen on pairing evening dress seal & silver sporrans with tweed.

Time for pictures!

Victorian day dress, tweed with brown-grey long hair sporran with plain leather cantle, a far cry from Victorian formal sporrans.



The coming of the new small brown leather "day" sporran, 1910



The fully developed post-WWI traditional Day Dress with brown leather sporran



Selection of Day Dress sporrans in a 1938 catalogue



TCHD continues: 1960



The impact of Kilt Hire 1980s to present: some monochromatic hire outfits, semi-dress sporrans, black day sporrans, greyscale tartans, etc