Traditional Irish clothing is a subject where the story we all repeat and the story the museums tell are not the same thing. I went looking for the documented version and found a practical history of linen and wool, two centuries of law about what people could not wear, and crafts far younger than we assume. For anyone who sews, the details are the best part.
The Leine And The Brat
The medieval Gaelic wardrobe rested on two garments. The first was the leine, a linen tunic. P. W. Joyce, in his 1906 Smaller Social History of Ancient Ireland, describes it as loose and flowing, usually dyed saffron, with many folds and plaits and much material, sometimes as much as thirty yards. That sounds fanciful until you understand the cut: the leine was not shaped, it was gathered. Costume researcher Kass McGann puts the figure for a sixteenth century leine at up to fifteen modern yards, pleated into the neck and body so it hangs in dense vertical folds, then bloused over a belt. The sleeves are narrow at the upper arm, widen enormously at the elbow, and hang long.
Over it went the brat, a woollen mantle. Joyce describes it covering the whole person from the shoulders down, generally sleeveless, with a fringed or shaggy border round the neck and down both front edges. There is almost no tailoring in it. Bog examples in the National Museum of Ireland include plain wool and a shaggy woven pile. Edmund Spenser, writing in 1596, describes it being used rather than fitted: loose in summer, wrapped close in winter, hooded over the head, or wound round the left arm as a shield. He loathed it, calling it “a fit house for an outlaw, a meet bed for a rebel, and an apt cloak for a thief.”
When The Law Came For Irish Dress
In 1537 the Irish Parliament passed the Act for the English Order, Habit and Language. It banned saffron dyed linen shirts, smocks, kerchiefs and caps, and mantles, coats and hoods made after the Irish fashion. Then came yardage limits: a 1539 act forbade above seven yards of cloth in a shirt, and a Dublin parliament in 1541 set further limits by rank. You legislate in that much detail only when people are still wearing the thing.
Cloaks And Red Petticoats
By the nineteenth century the picture had changed. A statistical survey of County Clare in 1808 records women in red petticoats and short jackets of the same cloth, a kerchief on the head and a cloak. They wove that cloth themselves, a coarse flannel which they dyed red. By 1836 imported cotton gowns had become everyday wear.
The hooded cloak lasted longest. The Kinsale cloak, worn in west Cork into the twentieth century, is a real sewing project: about four yards of heavy black melton, hand sewn with a long needle, lined with satin, trimmed with jet and beaded braid, closed at the neck with a single hook and eye.
The Costume The Revival Invented
Here is the first thing worth saying plainly. The Irish national costume of long embroidered dress and pinned cloak is not an unbroken folk tradition. Alex Ward, writing in the journal Costume in 2014 (volume 48, issue 2), traces it to the Gaelic League, founded in 1893, and the Dun Emer Guild set up by Evelyn Gleeson in 1902. The garments were a revived leine and brat, embroidered with Celtic motifs in coloured silks, made in green or royal blue Irish poplin and pinned with replica Tara brooches.
The crucial detail is where the designers looked. Norway built its national dress by adapting clothing people still wore. Irish revivalists read essays on ancient dress and copied the Book of Kells. Lady Aberdeen’s admired 1886 gown was based on a figure in an 1854 painting. Ward concludes the costume never became mainstream fashion. That does not make it worthless, only design history rather than folk memory.
The Cloth Ireland Really Is Known For
Flax has grown in Ireland since the first millennium, but linen took hold in seventeenth century Ulster. The Huguenot Louis Crommelin set up a model factory at Lisburn in the late 1690s, though scholarship now credits settlers from northern England as much. The work was seasonal and brutal: pull the flax in August, ret it, scutch it, hackle it, spin, weave, then bleach the cloth on grass.
Donegal tweed came from the other end of the country. Hand weaving reached the area in the 1700s, and the Congested Districts Board organised it in the late nineteenth century to relieve poverty along the northwestern seaboard. Women spun the wool at home from blackface fleece and the men wove it.
Irish lace is largely a nineteenth century relief industry, as the Ulster Folk Museum records. Carrickmacross began in County Monaghan in the 1820s, promoted by Mrs Grey Porter using lace she collected in Italy. Fine organdie is tacked over machine made net, outlined, and the surplus cut away, guipure bars linking the open areas. Limerick lace works the opposite way, embroidering into the net itself.
Aran Knitting And The Clan Stitch Story
You have heard this one. Every island family had its own stitch pattern, so a drowned fisherman washed up weeks later could be identified by his jumper. It is a wonderful story with no evidence behind it.
It appears to come from two places. The first is J. M. Synge’s 1904 play Riders to the Sea, in which a body is identified by hand knitted socks, and even there it is the number of stitches that identifies them, not a pattern. The second is Heinz Edgar Kiewe, an Oxford yarn shop owner who saw a resemblance between Aran stitches and Celtic knotwork and built a book on that hunch. Almost every symbolic meaning attached to Aran stitches traces back to him, and historians of knitting including Richard Rutt, Alice Starmore and Vawn Corrigan have dismantled it.
What is documented is more interesting. The National Museum of Ireland holds a red Aran cardigan from County Galway in blackberry, diamond and sheaf of wheat stitches. Its catalogue record notes that knitting was encouraged on the islands in the 1890s by the Congested Districts Board, and that the cable designs derive from Scottish and Channel Island fishermen’s jumpers. Synge himself noted in 1901 that younger men on Inishmore had taken to the usual fisherman’s jersey. Vawn Corrigan dates the adult Aran sweater to 1932, and the first commercial sale was in Dublin in 1935.
The yarn is bainin, undyed cream wool, traditionally left unscoured so the lanolin stays in and the garment sheds water. The body carries four to six texture patterns, each roughly two to four inches wide, running as columns from shoulder to hem, mirrored about a centre line front and back and carried down the sleeves. The shoulders are saddle shoulders rather than a gusseted drop sleeve, which gives an Aran its square set. The cables are simple: a few stitches wait on a cable needle while the next are worked, so the column crosses over itself.
Traditional Irish Clothing Today
All of it is still made. Donegal tweed is handwoven again in Ardara, and Carrickmacross lacemakers still work organdie onto net. What has quietly gone is the everyday clothing. The leine, the brat, the red flannel petticoat and the hooded cloak are museum pieces now.
Conclusion
What I take from this, as a sewer rather than a historian, is that the honest version is more useful. A leine shows what a great quantity of pleated linen can do. A Kinsale cloak is four yards of melton and one hook and eye. Neither needs a legend attached to be worth copying. I have written the same sort of piece on Spanish, French and German folk dress. To sew with the fibre the Irish did best, try my roundup of free linen sewing projects and patterns. On the knitting, Alice Starmore’s Aran knitting books are the standard reference.
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