Highland dress

Highland dress is the traditional, regional dress of the Highlands and Isles of Scotland. It is often characterised by tartan (plaid in North America). Specific designs of shirt, jacket, bodice and headwear may also be worn. On rare occasions with clan badges and other devices indicating family and heritage.
Men's Highland dress typically includes a kilt or trews. Although this may consist of clan tartan, it is more usual for tartans to be chosen for aesthetic reasons. A tartan full plaid, fly plaid, or short belted plaid may also be worn but usually only at very formal events or by the groom at a wedding. There are a number of accessories, which may include but are not limited to: a belt, sporran, sgian-dubh, knee-socks with a cuff known as kilt hose, garters, kilt pins and clan badges.
Women's Highland dress is also based on the clan tartan, either that of her birth clan or, if married, that of her spouse's clan if she so chooses. Traditionally, women and girls do not wear kilts but may wear ankle-length tartan skirts, along with a colour-coordinated blouse and vest. A tartan earasaid, sash or tonnag (smaller shawl) may also be worn, usually pinned with a brooch, sometimes with a clan badge or other family or cultural motif.
In the modern era, Scottish Highland dress can be worn casually, or worn as formal wear to white tie and black tie occasions, especially at ceilidhs and weddings. Just as the black tie dress code has increased in use in England for formal events which historically may have called for white tie, so too is the black tie version of Highland dress increasingly common.
The codification of "proper" Highland dress for formal and semi-formal wear took place during the Victorian era, and these styles have changed little since then (e.g. the Prince Charlie, Sheriffmuir, and regulation jackets have an antique appearance, being based on Victorian military doublets of Highland regiments). In observing "constraints imposed by supposed rules and regulations governing ... what is perceived as permissible in Highland dress", Scottish historian Hugh Cheape writes (2012) that "uniform styles and conformity in dress conventions have emerged since the late nineteenth century and have been encoded in books and tailors' patterns; strict observance is expected and in some circles has become a touchstone of Scottishness. The perpetuation of such views, relatively recently formed, is a self-assumed role of guardians of Scottish 'ethnicity'." He contrasts this mode of regulated Highland dress with the kilt's contemporary "renaissance as a style item ... even a post-modern trend in kilt-wear instigated with the 1970s and 1980s punk styles; we see the kilt worn with chunky socks, boots, white T-shirt and black jacket".
Regardless of formality level, the basis of all modern men's and women's Highland dress starts with the tartan, either as a kilt, trews, arisaid, sash, or tonnag. Tartans in Scotland are registered at the Scottish Register of Tartans in Edinburgh, a non-ministerial department and are usually aligned to a clan or branch of a clan; however, tartans can also be registered exclusively for an individual or institution, and many "district" or "national" patterns also exist that have no associations to particular families or organisations.
Historically, weaponry formed a common accessory of men's Highland dress, such as the mattucashlass and the dirk. However, due to the UK's knife laws, small sgian-dubhs and sword shape kilt pins are more commonly seen today.
For men's and women's shoes, dance ghillies are thin, foldable turnshoes, now used mostly for indoor wear and Scottish dancing. The sole and uppers cut from one piece of leather, wrapped around the foot from the bottom, laced at the top, and seamed at the heel and toe. Ghillie brogues are thick-soled welted-rand shoes. In both, the laces are wrapped around and tied firmly above the wearer's ankles so that the shoes do not get pulled off in the mud. The shoes lack tongues so the wearer's feet can dry more quickly in the typically damp Scottish weather.
Highland dress may also be worn as a folk-costume option at events requiring morning dress. As such, for formal day-wear use it generally consists of:
Men:
The traditional white-tie version of Highland dress consists of:
Men:
The semi-formal version of Highland dress consists of:
Men:
Traditionally, black-tie Highland dress comprises:
Men:
In 1618, a poet from London, John Taylor, described the costume of Scottish aristocrats, lairds, and their followers and servants, dressed for hunting at Braemar. In August and September, all classes dressed in the same fashion by custom, as if equals. This included tartan stockings and jerkins, with garters of twisted straw, and a finer plaid mantle round their shoulders. They had knotted handkerchiefs at their necks and wore blue caps. Taylor said the tartan was "warm stuff of diverse colours."
Near the end of the seventeenth century, Martin Martin gave a description of traditional women's clothing in the Western Islands, the earasaid with its brooches and buckles.
According to the English military chaplain Thomas Morer in 1689, Highland men wore plaids about seven or eight yards (6.4 to 7.3 m) long, which covered from the neck to the knees except the right arm. Beneath the plaid they wore a waistcoat or a shirt to the same length as the drape of the plaid. These were "belted plaids." Their stockings were made of the same stuff as the plaid and their shoes were called "brocks" (brogues). Bonnets were blue or "sad" coloured. Morer noted that the fineness of the fabric varied according to the wealth and status of the man.
Scottish Lowlanders and Borderers were dressed much like the English, except both men and women also used a plaid as a cloak. The Lowland women wrapped their plaids over their heads as hoods, whereas Lowland and Border men wore a checkered maud (plaid) wrapped about their upper body. The maud, woven in a pattern known variously as Border tartan, Falkirk tartan, Shepherd's check, Shepherd's plaid and Galashiels grey, became the identifying feature of Border dress as a result of the garment's mention by fashionable Border Scots such as Walter Scott, James Hogg and Henry Scott Riddell and their wearing of it in public. Together with Robert Burns, they can be seen wearing a maud in portraits, etchings and statues.