Any person seeking to learn about the history of Irish dress will immediately be pushed in the direction of two books: any of the multiple versions of Old Irish and Highland Dress by Henry Foster McClintock, and Dress in Ireland by Mairead Dunlevy. These books were initially published in the 1940s and 1980s respectively, and long formed a vital stepping stone for this developing field of research. However,  their quality in light of readily accessible material today is poor, and their value in terms of scholarly and academic practice, most particularly for pre-1600 history, is, in my opinion, negligible.

I will dwell on these two texts for the first portion of this literature review, as they are the most frequently cited, even in academic contexts, and are still regarded as essential reading. I disagree with this claim, and believe that a more thorough understanding of Irish dress history, most particularly pre-1600, can be gleaned by investigating primary source material independently.

These texts rarely cite their information, fail to distinguish between individual opinionistic claims and established facts, and provide very little original or helpful material that isn’t easily retrievable on the internet. Prior to the widespread availability of information online, they were vital, and anyone who had access to a copy counted themselves lucky, but I am sad to say that things have changed and these texts are becoming increasingly obsolete.

The rare and hard-to-find nature of these long out-of-print books led many would-be historians and recreators of Irish dress to give up well before reaching the first hurdle.They have, to their credit, formed vital stepping stones towards primary source materials which I otherwise may not have been aware of, and were never intended as scholarly publications within an academic field, but rather, as summaries of key developments in Irish clothing over the centuries. As ‘through all time’ books, they are by their nature brief and skim over details, and this is not a flaw given their original purpose.

However, they are frequently being used in academic contexts and in the intensive research and re-creation of Irish clothing from specific eras with far more evidence available. Moreover, would-be researchers, particularly at a casual or hobbyist level are being told that they need to read these prohibitively expensive and hard-to-get texts in order to understand anything about Irish dress history. I own copies of both, as I am the sort of person who needs to thoroughly read something so frequently cited, but I can say with certainty that every bit of information I found in them I could also find online and for free. I just needed to dig a little.

The state of academic research into Irish historic dress is disappointing given the rapid development of dress history and textile archaeology elsewhere in Europe. We know a great deal about the clothing of England, but ignore her most direct neighbours. At times we know more about her relations with France or Germany than the nations she shares direct borders with!

The ‘celtic peripheries’ of the British Isles have long been excluded from discussions of their histories, with the focus lying firmly on England, and nowhere else. Wales, Scotland and Ireland are relegated to the sidelines as romanticised fantasy lands filled with noble savages, ancient customs, paganism and celtic witchcraft. Ireland in particular is treated as an isolated backwater with outdated customs and dress with little to no relevance to English history. But watch any drama set in the Henrician court, and you will constantly hear Ireland being brought up – she is everywhere, and yet nowhere. Constantly in discussion yet only in throwaway remarks.

The more spirited researcher might step outside the comfortable circle of McClintock and Dunlevy and look into the work of Elizabeth Wincott-Heckett, or even John Hunt’s work on funerary sculptures, or even quote the famous article by A T Lucas on shoes, despite a paucity of dates, and the oft ignored but key note that this work is intended to examine soleless stockings and not shoes, which seem to be a convenient addendum to the original purpose of the author. The typology is overly simplistic, not conscious of timescales and merits further development. The National Museum of Ireland has a substantial number of footwear items that have been recovered from peat cutting, but as their collections are not available online and there hasn’t been much published on them (partly due to a lack of interest in scholarship on Irish dress), they might as well be back in the bogs.

And so as I researched this subject, I became increasingly frustrated at the lack of scholarship, but then I recognised that there were some very significant gaps to fill, gaps I could help fill, and so with my bachelor’s degree in archaeology, I took off. I set myself a challenge to see how far I could get, how much information I could find on 16th century Irish dress without referring to McClintock and Dunlevy. The answer is around 600 pages of notes, theories and conclusions, and hundreds of primary sources, some of which had never been examined, others misquoted or misinterpreted.

With the recent publication of Textiles of Ireland by the incredible Elizabeth Wincott-Heckett, a book on Irish dress through time has joined the ranks, making some much needed updates and drawing on a more thorough academic background of research. This book is truly fantastic, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this subject, particularly as it focuses on archaeological material and extant garments, which are an invaluable source of information on historic dress.

Irish dress history is a field in its infancy, and there is so far left to go. It presently takes a great deal of willpower and stubbornness to delve into this field, but from my experience, it is greatly rewarding. Particularly for the 16th century, there is a wealth of information to be gleaned from English accounts (mostly complaints about how the Irish, for some reason, aren’t very English), sumptuary legislation, and legal records, as well as the ever-important costume book (the illustrations of Lucas de Heere in particular), archaeological material, funerary sculptures and Irish records, which, to my knowledge, have not yet been consulted or translated (University College Cork is doing some amazing things with their CELT database however!).

McClintock and Dunlevy constitute the birth of Irish dress history, and have their place in the historiography of this developing field. And yet, 1950s books are rarely consulted on English dress covering the same periods in history. It sometimes feels as though this field of inquiry may have been stillborn, and further developments in literature are not only sparse but desperately needed.

McClintock also published images of sixteenth-century Irish people in a paper in 1953, Elizabeth Wincott-Heckett has written two excellent articles on tomb effigies of the Anglo-Norman elite, raising the curious notion of archaic dress presentation in funerary sculpture as a display of conservatism. This served as a much-needed extension of John Hunt’s examination of funerary sculpture across Ireland, which, though of great merit, often provides female figures with little description of dress in contrast to paragraphs elaborately detailing the men – which is to be expected from an armour expert.

In 2013, John R Ziegler published Irish Mantles, English Nationalism, an examination of the contemporary distinguishing between English and Irish dress through the most iconic item of Irish dress throughout history: the mantle, or to use the appropriate Irish term, brat.

By far the best quality publication on the subject to date is Susan Flavin’s PhD thesis, reworked into a 2014 book, Consumption and Culture in 16th Century Ireland. Flavin examined plentiful data from Bristol customs accounts – Bristol being the port through which English goods were exported to Ireland in the 16th century. Through this data, a sense of the types of garments worn can be ascertained, and the gaps suggest local production of particular items of clothing, or lack of interest in such styles to begin with. By using robust historical data, Flavin has formed a firm base around which to go forth and examine Irish dress of the 16th century. I would argue that this, in combination with Wincott-Heckett’s 2025 book, should be the basis for future inquiry into the clothing worn during this period in Irish history.

Valuable work has been undertaken by amateur and academic historians alike – Kass McGann of Reconstructing History has reproduced patterns of key archaeological finds of Irish dress, and the book Beyond the Kilt is cited from time to time although, in my opinion serves best as a springboard from which to jump into primary source information, providing very little on the dress of women in particular and again, being hard to find and expensive. I personally do not recommend this text as it has very little to contribute.

Two even earlier books are occasionally referenced; the 1788 An Historical Essay on the Dress of the Ancient and Modern Irish and Ancient Costumes of Great Britain and Ireland, whose publication date could be as early as 1772. These are of no value to any serious inquiry. The representations of funerary sculptures may be more detailed than any that can be obtained today due to erosion, but still mimic the contemporary fashions and stylistic conventions of their times, overriding much of the unique detail that could otherwise be gleaned from them, and making it difficult to distinguish which elements are represented in the original sculptures versus what creative liberties, so to speak, have been taken. They also fall victim to the widespread romanticisation of Irish culture, and present an idealised fantasy of “Celtic” history as opposed to a thorough examination.

The abundance of primary sources is remarkable, but this concludes the scholarship that I have found on the subject of Irish dress history, noting my focus on 16th century feminine dress. It’s even worse for earlier periods.

And yet, the Irish wrote in spades about the dress of their heroes, there are thousands of archaeological finds, stone carvings, and accounts – no-one has published them.

This appears to be a consistent problem in Northwestern Europe – Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes, Shetlands, Hebrides, Orkneys, Ireland and Scotland are almost always left out of the discussion entirely, and yet, in part due to their unique climates, they have countless examples of preserved material. Unlike England, Ireland has full garments and outfits from the 16th century.

Travelling through the Scottish countryside in late 2023, I was utterly awestruck by how many Pictish stones we passed by: on the side of the road, in the churchyard, in the town square – many of which bore clear representations of people in dress. And yet, I would routinely be told that there was nothing on Pictish dress. That we had no idea. The most miniscule amount of actual effort greatly contradicts this.

This is a field crying out for examination, and in desperate need of thorough inquiry. An iconographic analysis of artworks and sculptures is vital, and must be undertaken in consideration of modes of dress found elsewhere in Europe and the British Isles – though Ireland may have been geographically isolated, she was by no means unaware of continental fashions. 

The influence of Spain and the Basque peoples on Ireland also merits investigation – these were some of their most vital trading partners, from whom the Irish obtained the famed saffron with which they dyed their linens. Comparison to their modes of dress, and investigation into their records would prove most valuable.

Whilst I am an avid reader of the works of Elizabeth Wincott-Heckett, I must raise questions on her theory that the unusual and ceremonial styles of dress sported by Anglo-Norman elite in their funerary sculptures constitute archaic dress which was not regularly worn. These garments are clearly constructed in very different ways to their English counterparts of several centuries prior, and the thought of the Irish nobility dressing in English styles two hundred or so years out of date is puzzling. I believe that the theory that this dress, whilst ceremonial, is not only contemporary to, but unique to 16th century Ireland is worth investigating.

More broadly, the divisions between native, Anglo-Norman and English dress have yet to receive any substantial attention. Records such as wills, and vitally, Irish language records, have been almost entirely left out of the discussion. To my knowledge there has been no inquiry into Irish descriptions of dress in Irish language records for any period of pre-1600 history, which is a tremendous shame given just how much the Irish wrote about the clothing of their heroes in their legends.

Archaeological material has been left uncatalogued, unexamined, or unstudied. The art of costume books is a subject that has been receiving some attention, particularly in the realm of 16th century understandings of ethnicity and nationhood. Whilst it is true that many of these books copied to high heaven, and poorly represented their subjects, a cursory glance at written records of the 16th century will show a clear overlap of features, hence they should not be outright dismissed.

This is a developing field with many opportunities for original research, as this review demonstrates, there is precious little secondary material, and the texts which form the basis for many interested parties, in my opinion, should not be relied upon.

There are many directions that research into this field could take, which would draw from disciplines such as archaeology, history, art history and Celtic language studies to name a few.

For any amateur costumer, the field of Irish dress can be daunting, overwhelming, even. But the issue is not a lack of material – it is a lack of scholarship. Given how much I have come across in my research, which in comparison to many academics constitutes a cursory glance over materials that I could find on the internet for free – there is so much more out there.

There is so much material out there – but so little written on it. I hope I can help to fill that gap.

And thus concludes my salty literature review. Please take my criticisms as a sign of my passion for this field of research, I am an opinionated woman with citations on hand and enjoy a good essay.

Until next time, dear reader

Kate