I've always been interested in historical clothing, and specifically Scottish Highland Dress.
Anyone who has done any delving into historical clothing is aware that Hollywood rarely does things accurately.
Hollywood costume designers generally come to a consensus of how to costume various periods, and the public seeing certain periods depicted a certain way in film after film will begin to believe the Hollywood construct as being correct.
There's a very knowledgeable YouTuber Bernadette Banner who does annual reviews of the accuracy of the costumes of all the major historical films and television shows. One theme she's repeatedly ranted on is Hollywood's obsession with making everything in historical films fasten with laces.
Since we know that lace-up "pirate shirts" and "Jacobite shirts" didn't exist in any historical period in Scotland or the Caribbean or anywhere else the most likely culprit is Hollywood.
But the origin of Highlanders running around in shirts (and shirtless!) goes back to RR McIan, the pen-name of English actor, costume designer, and set painter Robert Jones, who did the illustrations of 'ancient Highlanders' for the 1845 book The Clans of the Scottish Highlands.
We have plenty of paintings of 18th century Highlanders and they didn't look anything like that. They wore jackets, they didn't run around in shirtsleeves or in waistcoats.
But those RR McIan illustrations influenced later illustrators and eventually Hollywood, as can be seen in various depictions of 'ancient Highlanders' in films going back into the 1930s to today.
And if they were to wear just a shirt without jacket, 18th century shirts didn't lace up. They looked like this. They closed with a button at the collar.
Very nice quality reproductions of 18th century shirts can be had.
In any case here's a thread I did a while back about one possible origin of the pirate/Jacobite shirts:
https://www.xmarksthescot.com/forum/...origins-98430/
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