It's an interesting though perhaps impossible task to pin down when our modern traditional civilian Highland Dress came entirely into its current form.
Yes World War One is the best and clearest divide between Victorian Highland Dress and modern Traditional Highland Dress.
Though reading Farquar MacQueen Douglas (1910) and seeing the photos he includes tells us that some of the processes had already begun, for example him stipulating the small all-leather sporran for what he calls Morning Dress (what we call Day Dress). These sporrans were just making their appearance at the end of the Victorian period.
And the de-accessorising of Evening Dress had begun too: gone were the crossbelts, swords, powder-horns, pistols, and long plaids, but the smaller Evening Dress belted plaid and the dirk remained. They, too, were gone by the 1920s.
Proud Mountaineer from the Highlands of West Virginia; son of the Revolution and Civil War; first Europeans on the Guyandotte
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