(Re)Defining British Folk Costume

This essay has been written by Dr Chloe Middleton-Metcalfe to accompany the landmark exhibition Making Mischief: Folk Costume in Britain.

British folk costume is a wearable chimera. It can be designed, manufactured, touched, displayed, danced in, and photographed, and yet it remains staunchly mythical, too heterogenous and fleeting to be described in detail, too often dismissed as being nothing more than fabricated fake-lore. This dismissal comes hand in hand with the truism that there is no singular, British costume. This argument conflates the concept of popular, abundant, and eclectic folk costume with a singular, homogenous state-approved national dress, of which there are only a few examples in the whole world.

In Britain, as in many other places, the label of folk is applied to many different costumes and dressing practices. This essay explores the most well-known examples of folk costumes from the constituent nations of Wales, Scotland, and England. What forms these tangible examples of British folk costume take, and how they are made manifest is, of course, dependent on the shifting socio-political climate in which they are manufactured and maintained. I hope to provide an introductory panorama of a fascinating construct, which has so far largely eluded serious analysis. Before commencing, I wish to issue a caveat; whilst this is an article about Britain, I draw most of my examples from my particular field of expertise, which is the situation in England. For this acknowledged bias I hope to be forgiven.