Traditional Scottish Clothing: The Kilt, Tartan And The Real History

Traditional Scottish clothing is a subject where most of what everybody knows turns out to be wrong. Tartan is genuinely ancient, but the tidy system handing one sett to each surname is barely older than the sewing machine. The real story is better than the myth, and it tells a sewist something useful about cloth.

Where Traditional Scottish Clothing Began

Early Highland dress meant a long linen shirt called the leine and a heavy woollen wrap called the brat. Checked cloth turns up in Scotland long before anything resembling a clan register. National Museums Scotland traces tartan back to the display culture of medieval Gaelic society, a living tradition that has kept changing to suit the moment.

Colour came from what was to hand: local plants, lichens and roots, with bought dyestuffs when a household could afford them. A sett belonged to a district and its weaver, not to a surname.

The Feileadh Mor, The Great Kilt

The great kilt, feileadh mor in Gaelic, is not tailored at all: one length of woollen cloth, commonly four to six yards of double width material. You laid it on the ground over a belt, pleated it by hand, then lay down and buckled the belt at your waist. The lower half hung as a skirt. The upper half went over the shoulder, pinned or loose, or over the head in bad weather. It was garment, cloak and bedroll at once, and it appears in the written record from the late sixteenth century.

The Feileadh Beag, The Small Kilt

The small kilt, feileadh beag, is the ancestor of the modern one: the lower half of the great kilt made into a separate garment, with the pleats stitched down so nobody has to arrange them each morning. It came into use during the eighteenth century.

A hand stitched kilt takes around eight yards of cloth, the pleats tapered through the hip so the sett still reads correctly over the seat. Pleating is the skilled part, done either to the stripe, so one stripe repeats down the back, or to the sett, so the pattern reassembles across the pleats.

The Dress Act Of 1746 And Its Repeal

After the Jacobite defeat at Culloden in April 1746, Parliament passed the Act of Proscription, whose clothing clauses are usually called the Dress Act. From 1 August 1747 it was an offence for men and boys in the Scottish Highlands to wear the plaid, the philibeg, trews or any tartan garment. A first conviction meant six months in prison, a second transportation for seven years.

It did not apply to women, nor to soldiers in Highland regiments, so the army went on wearing tartan and ordering it by the mile. The Act was repealed in 1782.

Why The Clan Tartan System Is Mostly Victorian

Here is the part worth saying plainly, because almost every tartan shop implies the opposite. The idea that every Scottish surname carries an ancient tartan of its own is a nineteenth century invention, not an exaggeration of an older custom. It is a new system, sold well.

Three things built it. From 1815 the Highland Society of London asked clan chiefs to certify a tartan for their name, obliging many to pick one for the first time. Sir Walter Scott then stage managed George IV’s 1822 visit to Edinburgh as a tartan pageant, asking guests to appear in clan setts and putting the king himself into Highland dress. The Highland romanticism that followed did the rest. Then in 1842 two brothers styling themselves John Sobieski Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart published the Vestiarium Scoticum, presenting it as a copy of a fifteenth century manuscript listing the tartans of the Scottish families.

There was no manuscript. The Royal Collection Trust, which holds a copy, records that the book was later proven to have been an elaborate hoax by the brothers, whose real names were John and Charles Allen. Exposure changed nothing: many setts sold today as ancient clan tartans trace back no further than that forged volume. Hugh Trevor-Roper made the sceptical case in The Invention of Tradition.

None of that makes tartan fake. It makes the clan system recent. The cloth and the regional setts are old; the surname index laid over them is Victorian.

How A Tartan Is Actually Built

A tartan is not a print. It is a woven structure, nearly always a two over two twill, in which the same sequence of coloured stripes runs in both warp and weft. Where a stripe crosses itself you get a solid block of that colour; where two different stripes cross you get an even blend. That is where tartan gets its diagonal shimmer.

The repeating unit is the sett, recorded as a thread count. The Scottish Register of Tartans calls the thread count the DNA of a tartan: the colour stripes of warp and weft in sequence, and the number of threads in each stripe. A count reads like B24 W4 B24 R2 K24 G24 W2, letters for colours and numbers for threads.

Most tartans are symmetrical, so the pattern mirrors around fixed points called pivots, marked with a slash, and only half the count is recorded. Asymmetrical tartans have no pivots and repeat from the beginning, so they are written with three dots at either end.

Two practical things follow. That mirror symmetry is what lets you match a tartan across a seam, so cut with the sett as your reference rather than the selvedge, and decide where a pivot falls before you cut. And a sett has a real size, often several inches across, so a large sett on a small garment reads as random colour while a small sett on a wide skirt vanishes. Buy generously: matching a plaid always costs cloth.

The Rest Of The Outfit

• The plaid: a separate length of tartan draped over the shoulder, the surviving upper half of the great kilt.
• The sporran: a pouch worn at the front on a chain, because a kilt has no pockets. Plain leather by day, fur for evening.
• Kilt hose and flashes: heavy knee socks turned down at the top, held by garters whose coloured ends show.
• Ghillie brogues: tongueless laced shoes whose long laces cross the ankle and tie below the calf.
• The Prince Charlie: a short black evening jacket worn with a waistcoat and silver buttons. The Argyll is its daywear cousin.
• Bonnets: the tam o’ shanter is the soft wide wool one, the balmoral its neater relative with a toorie on top, and the glengarry the folding boat shaped cap with ribbons behind.

The arisaid was the female counterpart of the great kilt, a long mantle of light ground tartan, belted and pinned at the breast with a brooch. It faded during the eighteenth century. The Aboyne dress worn in Highland dancing looks old but is a twentieth century competition costume from the Aboyne Highland Games.

Traditional Scottish Clothing Today

The official record now is the Scottish Register of Tartans, established by the Scottish Register of Tartans Act 2008 and kept by National Records of Scotland. Anyone can design a tartan, submit a thread count and register it. Tartan is a living tradition with a public registry, not a closed code of ancestral rights.

More folk dress from this series:

Traditional Spanish Clothing: Dresses, Flamenco and Mantilla

Traditional French Clothing: 6 Regional Dresses

Traditional German Clothing And Dresses, Region By Region

Conclusion

Traditional Scottish clothing rewards a sewist more than most folk dress does, because so much of it is about cloth rather than cut. The great kilt was one uncut length; the small kilt is pleating and proportion. Learn to see the sett and where its pivots sit, and every plaid becomes something you can control. Choose the one you like. That is what people did for most of the story.

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