Buttons for a tweed kilt jacket

[OC Richard]

Just as an aside, to me it's interesting how horn buttons appear on tweed kilt jackets in all of my vintage Highland Dress catalogues (going back to the 1920s) yet in The Highlanders of Scotland (1860s) all the tweed kilt jackets appear to have ordinary buttons of the period (glossy plain black, looking exactly like the plastic suit buttons of today).

Yes the buttons are very small, but the paintings have an amazing level of detail, and none of the buttons appear to be the type of horn buttons we're used to nowadays. One might say that the artist ignored the actual buttons he saw, and substituted the familiar buttons of the period, but this cannot be the case: the HOS paintings display a variety of interesting buttons (just not on the tweed jackets).

[vmac3205]

Try PMing member vmac3205, she made three jacket conversions for me (all excellent) and has a source of buttons (I believe she told me once she gets them from her husband). I have three different color and style buttons on my jackets that she provided. Good luck!

Yes. My husband has a process that he uses to make very realistic buttons. They are free with the conversion.

[Benning Boy]

I have just one everyday kilt jacket, a Wallace jacket from Freedom Kilts. It's charcoal gray with dark faux antler buttons. Likewise the matching waist coat. I intend to remove these "traditional" buttons and replace them with ordinary suit coat buttons. I just don't wear the jacket enough to make the alteration urgent, so haven't gotten around to doing it yet, but I will.


Other jackets I plan to convert when my sewing skills are mature enough, will keep their plain buttons.


We often see this quotation here on X Marks: " The highland dress is essentially a 'free' dress -- that is to say, a man's taste and circumstances must alone be permitted to decide when and where and how he should wear it."


What doesn't seem to be posted at all is the preceding sentence: "And here let me caution those who either wear the Highland dress, contemplate doing so, or design attiring others in it, on no account to listen or pay the slightest attention to those whose attitude towards our national costume corresponds in every way to a martinet towards his uniform."


In the text by Stuart Ruaidri Erskine, "The Kilt and How To Wear It," both sentences appear in bold face and underlined. They are emphatic.

Erskine says nothing of buttons specifically. However, when interpreting his thoughts in general, there is in my mind no need to fret over buttons. If you absolutely have to have antler buttons, then seek them out, but there is no law (although our Martinets seem to want it so) that says you must only wear antler buttons on kilt jackets, and it seems to me no real tradition, in the strictest sense of the word, of wearing antler buttons. As OCRichard points out, antler buttons are apparently a fairly late contrivance. I suspicion antler buttons on kilt jackets may be a borrowing from Tyrolean dress, foreign to the Highlands, and quite likely a marketing gimmick more than anything else, which caught on well enough to give the illusion of being traditional. It would be interesting to me to study this. But the detective work is beyond me.

Do as you wish, whether you desire a jacket conforming to the fashion plates, or one that speaks of you alone. All that precedes is just my two cents worth.

[MNlad]

Of the four jacket conversions I have done, only one—the one illustrated earlier in this thread—has antler buttons. The reason was simple, they go so well with that particular tweed and the plastic "leather" buttons that came on the jacket screamed "imitation" across the room. I rejected the faux stag buttons for the same reason noted by Tartan Tess—they look like plastic Oreo cookies to me.

I replaced the plastic suit buttons on two other jackets with with real horn buttons. Again, because the original buttons just looked shiny and cheap and I lucked into horn replacements at an extremely reasonable price. Real horn buttons have a low sheen that plastic has a hard time duplicating and you have that slight variation between each button.

I believe I have one conversion left in me, and the candidate has beautiful leather buttons I wouldn't think of changing. It's much more a matter of aesthetics than trying to copy a particular look.