Quote Originally Posted by gpmeakin View Post
Why do we assume that everyone who had their picture painted a century or two ago was wearing the "proper" attire?
I don't suppose we can know what was considered "proper". All we can do is look at the imagry we have and draw what conclusions we can.

I have a huge number of vintage photographs, many from the same years that the portraits in The Highlanders Of Scotland were painted. They all agree. Any historian, given a large corpus of evidence showing one thing and no evidence showing anything else, would draw the obvious conclusion.

People in the 19th century couldn't wear sporran styles which hadn't evolved yet, no matter how much we might wish to project modern styles on the past. The long hair sporrans were the natural evolution of the sporran, the hair on which had first appeared in the 18th century and had got longer and longer in the early years of the 19th century.

Yes long hair sporrans were worn with ordinary outdoor day dress in the 19th century. The only other types of sporran worn then were animal mask sporrans and the occasional 100-year-old antique 18th century sporran.

Such as these...






this photo, taken the same year as some of the Highlanders of Scotland portraits were painted, shows precisely the same sort of dress.