Formal British-Made Men's Kilts & Tartans — Voted by the Community

The kilt comes from the Scottish Highlands. Its earliest form, the great kilt or belted plaid, probably developed during the sixteenth century from an earlier woollen cloak, and the first written description that clearly refers to it dates from 1594. It was a long length of cloth gathered into pleats and belted at the waist, with the rest worn over the shoulder for warmth and shelter. By the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century a shorter garment, the small or walking kilt, had appeared. It was essentially the lower half of the great kilt. The earliest documented version with sewn-in pleats is credited to Thomas Rawlinson, an English Quaker industrialist, in the 1720s, though historians dispute the story. After the Jacobite rising, the Dress Act of 1746 banned men and boys from wearing Highland dress, but the Highland regiments of the British Army were exempt, which kept the kilt in use until the ban was lifted in 1782. King George IV's visit to Edinburgh in 1822 helped make Highland dress a symbol of all Scotland, and clan tartans were developed during the nineteenth century. Since 2009, tartans can be recorded in the official Scottish Register of Tartans.