What is your recommendation for a good book about highland dress?

[OC Richard]

I have the 3rd edition of J. Charles Thompson’s So You’re Going To Wear The Kilt. But what books do you like on the subject? Is the above still the standard, or is there something more updated?

First I should point out that no book I've seen comes anywhere close to the amount of information available on this very site. Gathered here are weavers, kilt makers, historians, collectors, and others each bringing detailed knowledge of their realm of expertise to the table.

Perhaps most of all it's a coming together of people to whom Highland Dress is a lifelong passion. No book can simulate that!

Now about a book being "the standard" it seems to me that that designation has two quite different meanings:

1) A book being regarded as definitive and authoritative on its subject.

2) A book being the one most often seen on bookshelves and being sold by retailers.

About #2 it seems to me that SYGTWTK is the most widely seen American book on Highland Dress being sold by American retailers.

About #1 granted it's been a long time since I read SYGTWTK but my impression was that it was an introductory sketch on Highland Dress aimed at Americans with no prior knowledge of the topic. I recall questioning some of it assumptions and opinions.

I'm one of those persons who believes that you can't know where you are unless you know where you've been. I look at everything from the standpoint of someone with a passion for knowing the history and origins of things. With that caveat in mind here are some of my recommendations for learning about Highland Dress:

J Telfer Dunbar, History Of Highland Dress (1962)

A great one-volume overview of Highland Dress in general with in-depth chapters on numerous subtopics.

H F McClintock Old Irish & Highland Dress (1950)

I think this is the best book about the history of Highland Dress, for one reason that it's seen in the light of the history of Irish Dress, with which Highland Dress shares much of its past.

The Highlanders Of Scotland: The Complete Watercolours Commissioned by Queen Victoria from Kenneth MacLeay (1986)

Yes there's added text but it's all about the lovely watercolour portraits of 56 kilted men painted in the 1860s.

Since our 20th century Traditional Civilian Highland Dress evolved from Victorian Highland Dress these portraits are invaluable giving us the widest colour overview of 19th century kilt-wearing.

Loudon MacQueen Douglas FRSE, FSA Scot. The Kilt: A Manual Of Scottish National Dress (1911)

This book documents the crucial period when Victorian Highland Dress was evolving into our modern traditional 20th century Highland Dress.

Enough of the history stuff! Now into what we consider "traditional Highland Dress" today.

Our modern traditional Highland Dress was born around World War One and had evolved into its fully developed form in the 1920s. Excellent short articles about the current form and attitudes of Highland Dress are to be found in the Highland Dress catalogues from the 1920s and 1930s such as

Highland Dress: An Authentic Guide (Paisleys Ltd, Glasgow, c1930)

The Kilt and its Accessories (Rowans of Glasgow, c1930)

The longest and most informative articles I've seen are contained in

The Scottish National Dress (Wm Anderson & Sons Ltd, Edinburgh & Glasgow, c1930)

Articles cover the history of Highland Dress as perceived at that time, and explanations of Day Dress, Evening Dress, Highland Dress for weddings, and Court Dress. Really the best short introduction to our modern traditional Highland Dress I've seen.

We have to keep in mind that the 20th century traditional civilian Highland Dress that was fully formed by the 1920s then stayed almost entirely unchanged for the next half-century. Many men today still wear this form of Highland Dress.

The Highland outfits seen in photos taken in the 1920s and 1930s are often identical to the outfits seen in the 1960s and 1970s, or indeed today.

However a spanner was thrown into the works beginning in the 1970s with the tremendous rise of the Kilt Hire Industry in Scotland. New outfits were put together and hired in vast numbers, both using previously existing elements and also new things such as an entirely new category of sporran ("semi-dress") which was cobbled together from existing bits, and the then-new pure white kilt hose. Both the new hose and new sporrans were hired with the now-ubiquitous black Prince Charlie and Argyll jackets (which previously had been worn with the traditional Evening Dress accessories).

So Highland Dress today presents a bewildering picture to people who don't know the grounding of it. It's why I recommend books that give the grounding.