This paper will investigate the relationship between national identity, dress and gender in Scotland. Two major events in Scottish history, the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 and the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822, will be used as a foundation to demonstrate how the gendered approaches to national dress changed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This will be done using Jules David Prown's basic methodology for the study of material culture. This involves description, deduction and speculation of surviving artefacts, in this case three garments housed at the National Museum of Scotland.Sally Tuckett is in the third year of an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award at the University of Edinburgh, working with National Museums Scotland. The thesis looks at the clothing and textile cultures of Scotland in the long eighteenth century, and how garments and textiles were used to articulate identities.

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Ayrshire whitework, a form of embroidery considered a cheap and popular alternative to lace, was a significant industry in the nineteenth century. Employing thousands of women particularly in the south west of Scotland in the 1850s, the whitework trade combined skill and handicraft with industrial scale organisation, only to decline dramatically by the end of the century. Using census returns, parliamentary reports and contemporary commentary, this article explores the workings of the Ayrshire whitework industry. It will account for the dramatic rise and fall of the industry within the nineteenth century, looking in closer detail at the women of Ayr in particular, and build on existing literature to examine attempts to revive the industry at the turn of the twentieth century.

Through examining the surviving records of tartan manufacturers, William Wilson & Son of Bannockburn, this article looks at the production and use of tartan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While it does not deny the importance of the various meanings and interpretations attached to tartan since the mid-eighteenth century, this article contends that more practical reasons for tartan's popularity-primarily its functional and aesthetic qualities-merit greater attention. Along with evidence from contemporary newspapers and fashion manuals, this article focuses on evidence from the production and popular consumption of tartan at the turn of the nineteenth century, including its incorporation into fashionable dress and its use beyond the social elite. This article seeks to demonstrate the contemporary understanding of tartan as an attractive and useful commodity.Since the mid-eighteenth century tartan has been subjected to many varied and often confusing interpretations: it has been used as a symbol of loyalty and rebellion, as representing a fading Highland culture and heritage, as a visual reminder of the might of the British Empire, as a marker of social status, and even as a means of highlighting racial difference. These interpretations have become key elements of tartan's historiography, often driven by tartan's role as an iconic and unavoidable element of modern Scottish identity which leaves it connected inextricably to ongoing discourses that examine the relationship between identity, history and myth.1 A feature of twentieth-century scholarship was to either refute or assert the myths associated with tartan and Highland dress, with controversy over the invention of the kilt and the antiquity of clan tartans being foregrounded. 2 More recently focus has shifted to more nuanced interpretations of the

Fashion studies and dress and textile histories are increasingly popular avenues of study at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in the United Kingdom, and as such there is continuing debate both on how to engage in general with these fields, as well as how institutions in particular can interpret and deliver courses relating to these subjects. This article outlines how the postgraduate MLitt in Dress and Textile Histories at the University of Glasgow developed from previous incarnations at Winchester School of Art and the University of Southampton. It explores some of the challenges faced by institutions and students engaging with fashion studies and dress and textile histories, using the Glasgow MLitt programme as a case study.