An Argyll Is Not Called an Argyll in Scotland?

[OC Richard]

Today what we refer to as an argyle jacket...

Yes but as I point out whenever this topic comes up The House Of Edgar uses different names for those styles.

this is a fairly new idea of a standard jacket cut to a standard pattern. In the days of small independent tailor shops, each one would have had their own style...

Yes as a collector of 19th century photographs of men in Highland Dress one sees a much larger variety of jacket styles then.

Yet, there was not all that much variety of cuff-styles.

The three main 19th century Highland Dress cuff styles were not the random musings of tailors but firmly entrenched traditional styles; two traced back to functional 18th century cuff designs. (The pointed cuff, uncommon in Highland Dress, is an outlier and AFAIK is a purely decorative 19th century invention.)

The cuff called "Argyll" above is called in usual Highland Dress parlance the Gauntlet cuff, the cuff called the "Braemar" cuff above, and often called the "Prince Charlie" cuff, is called the Slash Cuff in ordinary historical dress parlance.

The Slash Cuff predates the Prince Charlie Coatee by more than two centuries.

Here, on the left, is a soldier whose doublet has the slash cuff worn on Highland doublets 1855-1869 (and, in earlier guise, back to the raising of The Black Watch in the mid-18th century). The piper, on the right, is already sporting Gauntlet cuffs, which became standard for all soldiers in 1869.



Where these styles came from: here are some 18th century coat styles. You can see the style that became the Gauntlet cuff in Highland dress (centre) and the style which became the Slash Cuff (left).



Functional slash cuff, mid-18th century



The round cuff, predecessor to the Gauntlet cuff, late 18th century