Vintage Deans of Scotland Pure New Wool Tartan Kilt Skirt - Brown, W25"

Labelled 8. It measures a modern 0 to 2. Flat, in inches: waist 25, hips 30, length 30. Vintage sizing is not modern sizing and the gap here is wide enough to send the right person away - so read the tape. The leather buckles give a little range either way, which a zip would not.

Thirty inches is a true midi: mid-calf on most people, and the length a kilt was always cut to before anyone shortened it.

It is built as a kilt, not as a skirt that looks like one. Flat apron front, deep knife pleats behind, leather straps and buckles at the waist rather than a zip - and the pin, which is the part that nearly always goes missing. A kilt pin does not fasten anything, incidentally. It hangs on the outer apron to weight it so the front does not lift.

The brown ground is worth noticing. Most clan tartans sit on blue, green or red. Brown is characteristic of the weathered palette - the third colourway after Ancient and Modern, dyed deliberately muted to look like cloth that has been in the ground and come back up. We are not naming a sett, because the label does not, and a tartan guessed from four colours is a tartan invented.

Pure new wool is a claim with teeth. It means wool that has never been used before - spun straight from the fleece rather than reclaimed from old cloth. The alternative, shoddy, is wool pulled back out of worn garments and respun: shorter in the fibre, weaker, duller. A Scottish maker putting pure new wool on a label is telling you which of the two you are holding.

Deans of Scotland made kilt-style pleated tartan skirts and wool knitwear, and the trade knows the label best from the 1970s through the 1990s. Beyond that we can tell you very little: we looked for a founding date, a mill and a company history and found none. That is ordinary for a Scottish maker of this size and not a reason to doubt the label, but we would rather say we looked than invent something.

Modern size: Waist 25 in.

Condition is close to perfect - no holes, no stains, the pleats still sharp and both leather straps sound.

One of one. Sold as found.

No returns - as is.