Hair Sporrans

[OC Richard]

Are the traditional hair sporrans considered proper to wear with non military dress? I've been informed that the hair sporran is an item worn by pipe bands and military units, and should not be worn with non military kilts.

I've been looking at a load of old photos and collecting old Highland Dress catalogues and as far as I can figure out, in the period around 1900 and the first decades of the 20th century Highland Dress sorted itself out into neat, compartmentalised categories.

Here's some photos from vintage catalogues showing these categories. Note how each mode of dress has its dedicated jacket, sporran, and footwear:









Both this civilian Day Dress and Evening Dress was quite distinct from military uniform. Civilian pipe bands usually dressed in miltary style uniform at that time. Military dress looked, and looks, like this:



But it was not always so!

In the 1860's Queen Victoria commissioned an artist to do a series of extremely detailed and accurate portraits of men in Highland Dress, published as The Highlanders of Scotland. In that book there are 56 kilted figures, and 46 are wearing long hair sporrans! This includes 16 men wearing long hair sporrans with otherwise quite plain Day Dress. No sporrans resembling the Day Dress and Evening Dress sporrans, as seen in the above mid-20th-century Highland Dress catalogues, appear.

In other words, long hair sporrans were the norm with all sorts of Highland Dress, from plain tweed jackets to the "riotous finery" of Victorian evening dress.

Here's what Day Dress looked like in the 1860's



In addition, I have a quite large collection of vintage photographs of civilians in the late Victorian/Edwardian period wearing long hair sporrans.







In the thread "Highlanders discuss Highland attire" (or summat) there were some photos posted of modern-day Highlanders wearing long hair sporrans with civilian Evening Dress, where this photo was posted of young men at the Oban Ball:



I wear a long hair sporran quite often, as can be seen in my avatar.

(By the way I use the term "long hair sporran" because both goat hair and horse hair were used in the old days, and the sporrans are often difficult to distinguish.)