From "Normal" to "Formal" - the kilt's place as a Highland garment

[McElmurry]

I don't think we differ by much then and things have become more casual in the last few decades, here in the UK. Also the advent of the "cheap suit" and the "cheap" kilt has brought these items of clothing within the reach of many more people's pockets should they choose to want one. Nevertheless "formal" and "dress" in the UK does not, even these days, mean a suit.

For purposes of this thread, and considering the limits of generalizing about a population of 300 million people, I think we are close enough. Meanwhile, back in the Highlands, the kilt is being set aside as everyday rural wear for some reason. Is it industrialization, poverty, proscription, urbanization …enquiring minds want to know.

[Jock Scot]

Ok,enquiring minds.I think it is probably a combination of many things why the kilt is not used for everyday wear these days and for the best part of two hundred years. I mention these ideas in no particular order, but I think practicality comes head of the list. Remember we are not talking Scotland here, we are talking Highland Scotland---- they are not the same in culture, or history.

The Highlands is almost entirely rural and frankly if some one had invented a replacement for the kilt for rural work I would have been first in the queue!The kilt really does not lend itself to robust practical efforts, in dreadful weather, and umpteen billion midges, ticks and horse flies(Cleggs). Not much good in an open fishing boat in midwinter 20 miles from shore either.

Since the merging of the two Crowns (England& Scotland) the highland gentry became more Europeanised and less "Highland". So European fashions and ideas became the norm.

Since the tailored kilt became the fashion, tailoring became far too expensive for the ordinary man.So if one could have been afforded it would most definitely would not be worn to shear the sheep!

There is a most definite reverse snobbery used by the Highland Scots that, I think, started in the Great Victorian Romantic period and there is , even now, a distinct smirk on many a Highlanders face when they see a "foreigner" wearing the kilt. The thought goes along the lines of; " If THEY are going to wear OUR kilt, then WE wont!" which goes very much along with the wonderfully obtuse ,but oh so frustrating Highlanders mindset. It is a look that you will not see in the south of Scotland.

Until recently the cost of the kilt was such that it could only be worn for "best" by most people, even by some of fairly wealthy. Don't forget the formal highland balls and assorted social gatherings were not available to the common man. Even the not so common man would have extreme difficulty in mixing with the "establishment".

There you go, a few random thoughts to ponder on.

[Angus MacDonald]

After my fourth great Grandfather excaped the Hanover King when the battle of Culloden was lost in 1746 he came to Virginia. He had been an officer in a highland regiment from Glengarry, his father was killed in '46 at Culloden. Anyway, I have no information regarding his wearing of a kilt after he reached Virginia, that doesn't mean that he didn't, just it hasn't been mentioned in any writings about him.
I think that people have a tendency to wear what is the custom of whatever place they are in. There are millions of people of Scottish decent in this great country and I personally would like to see them all wearing the kilt.
Angus MacDonald

[BoldHighlander]

There are millions of people of Scottish decent in this great country and I personally would like to see them all wearing the kilt.

Amen cousin!

After my fourth great Grandfather excaped the Hanover King when the battle of Culloden was lost in 1746 he came to Virginia. He had been an officer in a highland regiment from Glengarry, his father was killed in '45. Anyway, I have no information regarding his wearing of a kilt after he reached Virginia, that doesn't mean that he didn't, just it hasn't been mentioned in any writings about him.

I've read more than once that at the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge (February 27, 1776; where the cry "King George & Broadswords!" was heard) that the Scottish Highland loyalist contingent from the Cape Fear region resembled a Jacobite army in their varied tartans.
In fact many were ex-Jacobites, & one individual who helped recruit the Scots loyalists was Allan Macdonald, husband of Flora Macdonald (yes, that Flora Macdonald )!

The survivors of the battle would go on to help form the nucleus of the 84th Regiment of Foot, the Royal Highland Emigrants.

Anyhow, I don't know if this points to kilts still being worn up until that time on a daily basis in the New World by emigrant Scots, or if these were prized kilts that had been hidden away after the '45, only to see the light of day for certain occasions (in this case a battle)?

[ThistleDown]

Good question, Brian. I take it to mean the decline, fall and rise of the kilt IN SCOTLAND, and not about any similar or dissimilar process in any other part of the world. You will have read Jock's native understanding. Here's mine.

The process was much more gradual than the compression of time seems to indicate; think about the normal changes to any society’s fashion over three hundred years. What’s amazing about Highland dress is that it survived at all.

Firstly, the kilt was not universally worn in the Highlands at any time in history. Secondly, much of what we call Highlands today was not thought of as Highlands in the 18C and 19C. Royal Deeside, for example, and north to the coast.

The forty-year Proscription Act did not in itself cause the kilt to almost vanish. Other pressures contributed much more. The end of the clan system, the conversion of patriarchal chiefs to landlords, and the intrusion of outside influences began early in the 17C. Look to the Statutes of Iona and the 1609 Clan Chattan Band of Union as proof of that. The pace of change was quickened with the aftermath of the ’15 and the ‘45 and the alterations in society’s structure that came with new laws.

Industrialisation in the Lowlands and Northern England encouraged people from some fringe areas of the Highlands to seek betterment in more favourable economies, and the hardy cloth products of industrialisation found increasing acceptance at home in the glens.

Changes in land ownership in the Highlands, accompanied by the wholesale departure of the natives and significant immigration applied a different kind of pressure, as well. Keep in mind that there were several “clearances” from the mid 18C to the latter half of the 19C and each was different than the others.

One of these clearances was of the men who traditionally were the buffer between the aristocracy and the common country folk. These tacksmen took with them the most skilled tenants. Behind them were left a very poor people toiling under disconnected or never connected masters.

Two other “clearances” were the ones we hear most about today. These forced much of the remaining populace from the land, replacing them with non-Gaels.

By the time Queen Victoria and Prince Albert fell in love with the Highlands and purchased Balmoral and romantic painters such as Landseer, Ansdell and Macleay took their talents to the North who were the people of Highland Scotland?

They were an incredibly poor native folk treated as semi-savages by those above them – which was almost everyone except the travellers who were even farther down the ladder.

They were Lowland shepherds and farm workers who saw all Highlanders as bandits.

They were Lowland and English farm managers and estate factors who viewed the native folk as indolent, filthy, ragged and in need of picking themselves up by their own bootstraps.

They were a remnant of the old aristocracy (most of them actually living elsewhere than on their Highland estates) embarrassed by their traditional relationship with the peasantry.

And they were a new aristocracy with no prior connection to the Highlands.

The kilt and other forms of Highland dress should just have died a natural death under those social conditions.

It was the bloody success of the Highland regiments in the development of Empire, Sir Walter Scott's orchestrated "event" and, later, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who saved it by dressing an incredibly wealthy class and, sometimes, their out-of-doors servants in romanticised interpretations of the long-gone dress of a terribly repressed and disdained local people.

Rex

Edit: What a valiant save! For clarification I should point out that all of the above only brings us to the middle of the 19C and that nearly all of what is Highland dress today occured in the space of the next 150 or so years culminating in today.

[Angus MacDonald]

Since the bloody British were still in charge over here in '46 I would imagine the the Jacobite refugees refrained from wearing the kilt in public. However, I can vizualize a battlion of Jacobites in thier full highland garb with broad swords charging the British forces during the revolution. It would be interesting to know what exactly the custom was at that time regarding the wearing of the kilt, maybe someone knows.
Angus MacDonald

[ThistleDown]

Since the bloody British were still in charge over here in '46 I would imagine the the Jacobite refugees refrained from wearing the kilt in public. However, I can vizualize a battlion of Jacobites in thier full highland garb with broad swords charging the British forces during the revolution. It would be interesting to know what exactly the custom was at that time regarding the wearing of the kilt, maybe someone knows.
Angus MacDonald

Actually, Angus, the kilted brigade were British loyalists. It is interesting that after the success of the rebellion in the Americas Flora Macdonald and her family went home to Scotland totally disillusioned. Perhaps Cajunscot or someone with far more knowledge of this period than my own can step in, but it is the understanding on the Scots side of the pond that roughly one-third of the populace were on the side of the Crown, one-third on the side of the rebels, and one-third who couldn't care which way it went. In that way perhaps it was a civil war more than a revolution In any case, we shouldn't hi-jack Woodshiel's thread too much.

Rex

[macwilkin]

Since the bloody British were still in charge over here in '46 I would imagine the the Jacobite refugees refrained from wearing the kilt in public. However, I can vizualize a battlion of Jacobites in thier full highland garb with broad swords charging the British forces during the revolution. It would be interesting to know what exactly the custom was at that time regarding the wearing of the kilt, maybe someone knows.
Angus MacDonald

The ex-Jacobites in the American colonies tended to side with the British, or at least attempted to remain neutral in the first American "Civil War". Duane Meyer's history of the Highland Scots of North Carolina discussed the reasons why they refused to side with their rebel neighbours.

It may fit the patriot myth to have these Heilan Laddies charging the Lobsterbacks, but in reality, they were Loyalists, fighting against the descendants of Lowlanders, who viewed the redshanks like they viewed Indians across the pond.

T.

[piperdbh]

Here's my two cents' worth:
The kilt or belted plaid may have fallen out of favor as more people worked in factories with machinery that could easily entangle stray fabric. (I used to work in a sawmill, and a tooth on the blade once caught my leather glove and could have chewed my arm into pulp. Thanks be to the Lord, the glove slipped off and left my hand unharmed.) Britches would have made more sense than kilts to wear in a factory, and used far less fabric, making them cheaper to produce.

Kilts and tartan may have come back into favor in the late 1800s because of new dyes which could produce bolder colors than the old plant-based dyes. From what I've read about Victorian culture, they liked color.

The end.

[ThistleDown]

Here's my two cents' worth:
The kilt or belted plaid may have fallen out of favor as more people worked in factories with machinery that could easily entangle stray fabric. (I used to work in a sawmill, and a tooth on the blade once caught my leather glove and could have chewed my arm into pulp. Thanks be to the Lord, the glove slipped off and left my hand unharmed.) Britches would have made more sense than kilts to wear in a factory, and used far less fabric, making them cheaper to produce.

Kilts and tartan may have come back into favor in the late 1800s because of new dyes which could produce bolder colors than the old plant-based dyes. From what I've read about Victorian culture, they liked color.

The end.

There's definitely some truth in your theory, dbh. Trousers are much less likely to get caught up than yard after yard of kilt. However, there was almost no industry in the Highlands and where there was (the gunpowder works on Loch Fyne, for example) there are no records of the kilt being worn. Well, no, but there are two tales of trousers catching fire at the charcoal furnace that preceded the gunpower factory.

Industry in Scotland was pretty much located in Fife and in the Forth-to-Clyde industrial belt, with bits and pieces in Angus and up the east side of the country. I can assure you that it was hard enough on a grossly poor, Gaelic-speaking Highland family from, say, Highland Perthshire, having to go to one of those places of dirt and noise and crassness and sickness -- and rejection -- without making it even worse by having its male members kilted.

Rex