In gathering a fairly large collection of old photos of pipers and others in Highland dress, two things popped out to my eye:

1) the dress of pipers remained remarkably stable from the 1860's up through the 1920's.

2) most were wearing the same style of jacket.

3) this jacket style was not in the Pantheon of jackets received from the 1970's when I started playing (Montrose, Regulation, etc etc).

So, I've been wondering what this style of jacket was called.

Here's the first image I can find of it, a piper in 1865, followed by a number of other images of it:











And here's the Highland dress page from a vintage Henderson catalogue.



Note that it mentions "Celtic jacket with vest" and "doublet with vest".

Since this catalogue is from a pipermaker, and must have been from the period when the jacket style under discussion was nearly universal for pipers, one of these two, "celtic" or "doublet", must have been that style... but which one?

(Military-style pipe band doublets are listed on another page.)

By the way the Paisleys catalogue from 1940 continues to show this style (but only for boys, and girl Highland dancers??)



(By the way, my photos have been called into question as representing Highland dress as a whole as my photos are mostly of pipers. I collected photos of pipers because I play the pipes. I can assure you that for every vintage photo of a piper I passed up 20 or 30 photos of men dressed exactly the same way, the only difference being the "shells" appearing at the shoulders of some of the pipers' jackets.)