'Red petticoats, hooded cloaks and trusties. The clothes we wore in tradition and art.' will be the subject of a Westport Civic Trust lecture by Dr Anne O'Dowd in the Plaza Hotel, on Tuesday next March 28.
Studies of the clothing of ‘ordinary’ people in Ireland in the past must consider that very often the clothes were generously patched and frequently described as having a ragged appearance.
The ‘allagashtees’ and ‘geegaws’, for example, were flashy but shoddy clothes; a gioblachán was a ragged person and ‘trallywaggers’ and ‘stramals’ were rags of clothes hanging off the body.
Visitors to Ireland took a great deal of notice of Irish people’s clothes when writing about their travels. By the time the traveller writers came into their own at the beginning of the 19th century, there are many complimentary accounts of everyday clothing. And visiting and native artists through the 19th century were influenced by the travel writers and were also taken with the colourfully dressed groups going about their everyday business.
In 1940 a questionnaire on ‘Old time Irish country dress’ was circulated by the Irish Folklore Commission to more than 200 correspondents throughout the 26 counties. Thousands of pages of information were collected about clothing worn in the last quarter of the 19th century.
Throughout the centuries the importance of the colour red in clothing is striking. Red - both rua and dearg - was traditionally associated with the supernatural world - fairies, witches, the devil (an diabhail, an slua aerach, na daoiní beaga ) - and afforded protection from these beings, as well as from illnesses such as shingles, rashes and whooping cough.
If red was the most popular colour in clothing, green was its opposite in every respect being almost despised as a colour to be worn. Throughout the country it was considered an unlucky colour which brought sorrow, death and grief. In particular a young woman would not dare wear this colour on her wedding day.
In Claremorris, county Mayo, for example, a girl would never wear green from childhood to marriage as the ‘old people’ believed that green would bring misfortune to a girl – that is, scandal and an implication of pregnancy outside marriage.
Dr Anne O’Dowd who lives in Co Mayo is a former curator in the National Museum of Country Life at Turlough Park House, Castlebar. She is the author of Spalpeens and Tatie Hokers: History and folklore of the Irish Migratory and Seasonal Worker in Ireland and Britain (1991 ), and Straw, Hay and Rushes in Irish Folklore (2015 ). She is currently writing a book on traditional clothing’, ‘working dress’, and ‘common clothes’ in rural Ireland in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
