Richard, I usually enjoy your posts, but this is utter nonsense. For a start, not even in the Highlands is Highland Dress considered entirely traditional. It's most certainly not "unbroken" by a long shot and again the Irish/Highland angle, which seems to still come from Bede's myth being reported as actual history.
There are a great many in Scotland who consider Highland Dress, (as we know it) to be a creation of the fashionable upper class Victorians. A lot of our ideas about Highland dress, and indeed customs, come from the Highland Society of London's ideas on what was traditional. These were very wealthy people privately educated in England, where they lived although some owned land in Scotland. I no more consider them to have an idea of Highland tradition than I would any other absent Scottish landowner, such as the Sultan of Brunai or even Donald Trump, (although he does keep going on and on and on about it).
Highland dress also went through a period of reinvention about 100 to 80 years before the Irish reinvention. It's the view of many pipers that when we wear Highland dress we are dressing in the style of our Victorian forebears, but probably not much further back. That's how it was taught in Aberdeenshire, that's how it's taught in Strathclyde, and I have been told the same goes for Tayside and the Lothians too. It's been a couple of years since I have been in Inverness or Skye so I can'y comment there. The likes of Angus MacKay and the subjects painted in Kenneth McLeay's Highlanders of Scotland in the 1860's were being dressed by their employers in the type of clothing that those self same employers hope would reflect their status, wealth and taste. Victorian taste. However, they did like to represent it as something ancient.
In a reflection of the Highland Society of London, the Irish Gaelic League was also originally composed of very wealthy people privately educated in England, where many of them lived, although some owned land in Ireland as well. They held their meetings in Kensington. An equivalent might be fashionistas of Beverley Hills meeting to discuss how Appalachian mountain dwellers would dress.
Of course, as I've said before, if the kilt, etc, is the traditional dress of the bonny bonny Heilan's, and everyone wore it, then why do the bodies found in Highland bogs there not show evidence of this?
Originally Posted by MacSpadger
Richard, I usually enjoy your posts, but this is utter nonsense. For a start, not even in the Highlands is Highland Dress considered entirely traditional. It's most certainly not "unbroken" by a long shot and again the Irish/Highland angle, which seems to still come from Bede's myth being reported as actual history.
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