rethinking "traditional" dress and the Hire impact

[OC Richard]

Those are different jackets.

The earlier photos show Regulation Doublets with slash cuffs, worn with bow ties.

The shot of the whole band shows what appears to be some kind of short jacket, like Battle Dress or Ike, with gauntlet cuffs, and worn with long ties.

There was a huge yet short-lived craze in the post-WWII era for cropped jackets more or less based on the British Battle Dress jacket or the American copy of it, the "Ike jacket".

Police, security, truck drivers, postal employees, and civilians all started wearing cropped jackets and it impacted Highland Dress also.

Several Highland-ish variants appeared, the ones in that band photo are some of them, I'd bet.

Here are the Alexander Brothers in them! Loads of pipe bands wore them too, in a variety of styles.





Or they could be coatees, another post-WWII fad, due to the UK Highland regiments adopting coatees in 1953.

In any case I recently came across this photo of Triumph Street in 1978, early wearers of what was to become the standard Pipe Band dress ever since, the black Argyll & Ghillies look. Notice the leather sporrans were brown, at that time Day sporrans were brown as a matter of course, but soon enough black ones would become popular.