Quote Originally Posted by CDNSushi View Post
Well said. If anyone is concerned about wearing only that which is "traditional," I ask: How do you define traditional? It's quite arbitrary, really. If you go far back enough, our ancestors all wore animal skins. Start moving forward from that point in time, where's the appropriate place to stop? When men started wearing robes? When they started wearing medieval armor? When they started wearing trousers? When they started wearing <article of clothing>? To be certain, the commonly accepted definitions of "tradition" (such as what we would find in dictionaries or encyclopedias) do not presume to assign such a temporal limitation to the term. (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/tradition)... Where does it say that "In order to be called "traditional" a period of no less than xx years must have elapsed?"

The point is, who's to tell someone who's Irish that he shouldn't wear a kilt because it's not traditional for the Irish to wear kilts? (It's just as silly and preposterous as the article-in-question's author preaching that girls involved in Irish dance shouldn't wear tights because it's not traditional). All traditions, no matter what they are, have to have started somewhere, and if the end of the 19th century isn't far enough back, that's a matter of personal judgment. But let me just say, that if MY family had been doing something since the late 19th century, I would feel more than justified in saying that it was "traditional" for us to do so.

On a slightly different (yet analogous) note, many of the "Christmas traditions" we have just finished enjoying are merely a hundred years old, yet we would feel odd if we broke with "tradition" and stopped doing them every year.

So from this (my) vantage point, the Irish need absolutely NO additional justification to wear kilts, be they tartan or solid color, and neither does anyone else for that matter. The article in question may be bunk (as I believe that it is) but it also makes no never-mind either. Is it traditional? It's traditional enough. The hair-splitting I shall leave to didactic, soporific, and turgid history professors to discuss throughout the halls of academia in their doctoral dissertations and peer-reviewed journals.

Kilt on!


(Oh, one more thing. No disrespect whatsoever aimed at any of our forum's resident historians... I know that they are neither soporific, nor turgid)...
No, but we are didactic and pedantic...



When Matt & I wrote our article last year about the origins of Irish kilts & tartans, one thing we were very specific about was that we were not attempting to suggest that those of Irish heritage should not wear kilts; our intent was to dispel the myth that the kilt was an "ancient" irish garment. As with you, I would tend to agree that something with a late 19th century origin has all the hallmarks of being "traditional", especially in "young" countries such as the US and the Commonwealth. It was more of a response to articles such as the one in the OP that may be found all over the Internet promoting a mythical pedigree for Irish "national costume".

T.