Scottish National Dress and Tartan (Shire Library)
Stuart Reid
Language: English
Pages: 56
ISBN: 0747812187
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Tartan is an enormously popular pattern in modern fashion and Scottish National Dress is recognised around the world. This book reveals the origin and development of tartans and Scottish national costume. Beginning as Highland dress, it was originally peculiar to certain areas of Scotland but is now generally accepted as its national costume.
What was once ordinary working clothing of a distinctive local style has been formalised and embellished to turn it into a ceremonial dress suitable for days of celebration, while tartans once woven according to the fancy of those who wore them, have also become fixed with certain patterns prescribed for different families, areas or institutions. This process was not, as is popularly thought, a phenomenon begun by the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott, but began long before as a reaction to the Union with England in 1707. This book not only traces its evolution from earliest time, but the process by which it became Scottish National Dress.
TOC: Chapter I: The Highland Clans /Chapter II: Early Highland Dress /Chapter III: Rebels and Kilts /Chapter IV: Invention of Scottish National Dress /Chapter V: Tartan - a national dress /Chapter VI Scottish National Dress today /Appendix: Major Tartans
A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings
The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics
Red and black tartan which could be worn by his sitters, irrespective of family, to proclaim their nationality at a time when walking the streets in those same clothes would lay them open to arrest. There is no doubt that the chequered patterns which we now call tartan go all the way back to the ancient Celts. One of the earliest references, for example, is by Diodorus Siculus in the first century BC, describing how the Gauls wore ‘striped mantles … covered with numerous small squares of many.
Transposed. The Cameron of Erracht tartan bears no relationship to the Black Watch sett but was supposedly devised by Erracht’s mother, who was a MacDonald. Clearly there was a crying need for guidance on this point. Ordering a quantity of say Grant tartan was obviously much more straightforward than deciding between an otherwise anonymous number 23 or an equally anonymous number 30 tartan. Guidance therefore came in the first instance from Logan’s Scottish Gael of 1831, which included a list.
Terms, if laid out flat a kilt comprises three equal-sized portions: a central pleated area, which forms the back of the garment, and two flat aprons which fold one over the other to form the front. When putting on the kilt the right-hand apron is first passed across the body and secured at the left, and the left hand piece is then passed over the top of it and secured on the right. In the early days it was fastened with long pins and by way of preserving regimental tradition the Black Watch.
North and the MacDougalls in the West. Their lands, as it happened, stretched in a great arc from Lorne through Lochaber, Moray and Badenoch to the Buchan coast of the North East, and so included most of what would later become considered as the Highlands. Thus the eclipse of the Comyn lords of Lochaber and Badenoch effectively disenfranchised the Highlands in a Scotland thereafter dominated by the Bruces and their Stewart successors. At the same time the growing commercial importance of the.
Number of feathers until eventually they overwhelmed it to become the dominant feature of what was now a headdress. Consequently, by the 1850s the original bonnet was replaced by an even taller version made of dark blue cloth stretched over a wire frame, still retaining the diced band around the bottom. The crown was rounded rather than flat at the top and once the ostrich feathers were attached to the outside the result was a much shaggier appearance – often mistaken for bearskin. The feathers.