Today, you’ll mostly see tartan kilts worn at weddings or other formal events in a nod to the wearer’s heritage — even if they only lay claim to distant Scottish ancestry (Americans, I’m looking at you).

While you might envision the Scots sporting tartans as far back as the Roman attempts to invade their homeland in the late 1st century BCE, I’m afraid to tell you that that image would be anachronistic. The Gaelic tribes of the day actually wore a snazzy little number called a léine, the Gaelic word for “shirt”. The léine was a simple tunic worn long by women and either long or to the knee by men. They did became more elaborate by the 16th century, with sleeves that dangled to the knees and designs that were either pull-over or wrapped close like a bathrobe. While there’s archaeological evidence of tartan-like colours being worn in Scotland in the third or fourth century, these tunics were most commonly plain and saffron-coloured (although, to use modern parlance, they also came in multiple colourways 💅).

In reality, it wasn’t until as late as the 17th and 18th centuries that written records describe tartan as being characteristic of Scottish clothing. But these plaid styles weren’t the so-called “clan tartans” — they were mostly handwoven by local weavers using whatever natural dyes were available in the region. Depending on the local trade market, they may have been able to get their hands on dyes or ingredients from elsewhere, allowing them to play around with colours and designs.

By the 18th century, a standardised clan tartan system started to emerge when some regiments and families began adopting specific patterns following the Jacobite risings (a series of attempts to overthrow the ruling House of Hanover and restore the House of Stuart to the British throne). However, the real tartan boom didn’t come until Sir Walter Scott, a popular 19th-century Scottish novelist and poet, began writing works celebrating Highland culture, leading to a fascination in all things Highland. It was during this revival less than three centuries ago that many clan tartans were reinvented or popularised.

The Scottish claim to tartan was truly cemented by the publication of the Vestiarium Scoticum, a book claiming to map the tartans of the Scottish clans. Published in 1842 by the Sobieski Stuart brothers, the book catalogued clan tartans, allegedly based on a 15th-century manuscript the brothers claimed to find but conveniently never produced for verification. Scholars believe the the tartans were invented by the brothers for social prestige and to legitimise their own claims of descent from Charles Stuart. The rest, as they say, is history. Regardless of its legitimacy, tartan became a symbol of Scotland, and arguably the country’s most famous creation (along with whisky, although the Irish might have a thing or two to say about that).

But what if I were to tell you that tartan has much older origins halfway across the world?

While plaid might have been knocking about in Scotland for centuries before it became the pattern of choice, it was already á la mode in the Orient from at least 1000 BCE. That’s a good two-and-a-half millennia before the oldest known piece of true Scottish tartan was woven.

Initially discovered in the early 20th century, the Tarim mummies are a series of mummies discovered in the Tarim Basin in Northwestern China. Dating from as far back as 4,000 years ago to as “recently” as 500 BCE, the naturally mummified corpses were found strikingly intact thanks to the dry climate.

And that’s where it gets really interesting.

Some of the mummies possessed curiously Western characteristics, their heads still capped with blond or brown-hair. Meanwhile, others boasted the copper manes more commonly associated with the Celts than the Chinese. One in particular, known as Chärchän Man, was over six feet tall with red hair and a full beard. He was buried over 2,000 years ago in his funerary finest of which the most noteworthy statement piece was (you guessed it)…a tartan skirt.

Having walked the earth some time around 1000 BCE, Chärchän Man was already donning tartan around 2,600 years before archeological evidence showed the pattern first appearing in Scotland. There was some suggestion that the mummies, including our plaid-clad friend, were migrant Indo-Europeans who settled in the area thousands of years earlier. Could they have shared distant roots with the proto-Celtic peoples of the Halstatt culture, who would later inhabit the valleys of Austria, and eventually settle in locations across Europe, including Scotland? And could this be the earliest example of the pattern that would become so inherently associated with Scottish culture?

While it’s tempting to imagine that the Tarim Basin mummies were European migrants who found themselves halfway across the world, DNA evidence says otherwise. A 2021 study by Zhang et al found the mummies to be descendants of the Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), a small group of hunter-gatherers who migrated from West Asia to Central Asia thousands of years earlier. However (and it’s a big however), the study only tested the older Tarim Basin mummies (about 3,900-4000 years old) from the Xiaohe cemetery.

Chärchän Man may be another matter. He’s around 1,000 years younger than the Xiaohe mummies, by which time the population in the Tarim Basin had begun mixing with other groups, including people from the Andronovo culture, an Indo-Iranian, Indo-European-speaking culture from the western steppe. This means that his ancestry was probably different, possibly a blend of local Tarim ancestry and Indo-European/Andronovo ancestry. That could explain his more Western appearance and the plaid fabric, which might have been introduced through cultural exchange in the Eurasian steppes, the prehistoric equivalent of Piccadilly Circus.

So, while the Scots may claim tartan, its lineage is far older and more international than most people assume. From a red-headed mummy buried in the deserts of China to the reproduction clan tartans you’ll find in Scottish tourist traps today, the pattern has been woven and rewoven across millennia. The origins of tartan remain unclear but one thing’s for sure — it makes a fine a garment today as it did several thousand years ago. The pattern has become global shorthand for “Scottishness” but look a little deeper and it’s stitched not just into Scotland’s story but the shared tapestry of human history.

Prepare yourself to discover a fascinating fact about me: I rarely use a pocket. As the proprietress of a collection of handbags I’ve spent far too much money on, why would I choose to ram my possessions into shallow holes on the hips of my jeans? Or, worse, feel them jangling and slapping against my legs should I find the rare dress endowed with this elusive feature?

Pockets, when they appear in women’s clothing at all, tend to be more symbolic than functional. Women’s pockets are 48% less deep and 6.5% slimmer than men’s — if they’re not fake altogether, a bizarre illusion of utility known as ‘Potemkin pockets’ (from Potemkin village, a story dating back to 18th-century Russia, when Grigory Potemkin is said to have erected fake village facades to impress Catherine the Great during her tour of Crimea).

And don’t we know it. Most front pockets on women’s garments can barely fit a smartphone, let alone the miscellany of items most of us lug about on a daily basis.

You can’t miss something you never had, and so when the internet’s obsession with dresses with pockets ignited some years back, I’ll admit, I didn’t get it. After a lifetime without pockets, they’re not something I’ve ever given much thought to. But scratch the surface of this seemingly trivial issue and the lack of pockets in womenswear is, in reality, a centuries-long feminist complaint. And that, reader, is something I can get onboard with.

For time immemorial, people haven’t left home empty handed. Even Neanderthals wouldn’t have been seen dead outside of the cave without their favourite piece of flint. We carry what we need to get through the day, and whilst today we pack a myriad of items from smartphones to e-cigs, our medieval ancestors were more likely to be armed with coins and other small utilitarian items like a knife or handful of medicinal herbs. Their everyday belongings were often stored in a purse which, in the 13th century, would have been slung from the girdle of the tunic, before later being hung from a belt. Both men and women carried these pouches well into the late Middle Ages.

It wasn’t until the late 16th and early 17th centuries that pockets began to be sewn directly into men’s clothing, keeping external pouches out of reach from pick-pocketing paws. Women, of course, wouldn’t get to enjoy this smart sartorial innovation. Instead, they tied “hanging pockets” around their waists, concealed beneath layers of skirts and accessed through small openings in the fabric. They were inconvenient, but I’ll wager that was the point. A woman of independent means is a woman who can’t be controlled.

As menswear evolved, pockets became standard; in womenswear, like the women of yesteryear themselves, they would remain ornamental and mostly useless for centuries to come.

Men soon realised they had all these pockets and nothing to fill them with. Thus the mid-17th century saw a boom in pocket-sized men’s accessories — from pocket watches to pocket knives and pocket pistols. Soon, pockets became synonymous with manliness, a symbol of the adventurous and resourceful spirit with which men pride themselves on but, let’s face it, rarely put to the test.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, when riding horses was one of the few acceptable hobbies for wealthy women, a new style of equestrian wear began to emerge. Heavily influenced by men’s tailoring, the garb featured functional adaptations, including riding overcoats with, you guessed it, pockets. The women’s “masculine attire” caused quite the stir in high society, earning them the nickname “Amazons”, after the warrior women of Greek mythology.

Observing these women in June 1666, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary:

“Walking in the galleries at White Hall, I find the Ladies of Honour dressed in their riding garbs, with coats and doublets with deep skirts, just, for all the world, like mine; and buttoned their doublets up to the breast, with periwigs under their hats; so that, only for a long petticoat dragging under their men’s coats, nobody could take them for women in any point whatever; which was an odde sight, and a sight did not please me.”

When the suffragette movement took off in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, pockets in womenswear transformed into a symbol of liberation in a world where women were all too often still only for show. The suffragettes lobbied for the right to vote clad in dresses featuring up to six to eight pockets — the idea being to challenge the traditional notion of women’s clothing being purely decorative. Not to mention they needed somewhere to stash all those flyers. Their pockets were parodied on the poster for Charles Hoyt’s 1897 satire A Contented Woman which showed three disgruntled suffragists, hands stuffed in the pockets of their skirts and blazers.

Perhaps taking a leaf out of the page of these trailblazing feminists, Coco Chanel began putting functional pockets in her jackets in the 1920s. The trend, however, failed to take off amongst wider womenswear designers. As women’s clothing became more form-fitting in the decades that followed, pockets were considered a threat to the perfect hourglass silhouette. There’s even a theory that pockets are intentionally omitted from women’s clothing in order to force them into buying more handbags (if this is true, it’s worked. The global handbag industry is today worth billions of dollars — and I’ve fallen for it hook, line, and sinker). Or perhaps it’s the economic aspect: removing pockets means savings on supplies, materials, and production time, while still carrying a higher price tag than for comparable menswear items.

Today, despite greater equity between the sexes, pockets remain a deeply gendered issue. Browse any kidswear department and you’ll notice that aside from the obvious divergence in colours and patterns (boys are still budding adventurers whilst girls are pretty princesses and ballerinas), you’ll find boys’ clothes kitted out with pockets big enough to smuggle an assortment of boyish bric-à-brac while girls’ clothing still often lacks this functional feature (as if little girls should prepare themselves for a lifetime of carrying handbags from the age of three).

To sum up, men’s clothing throughout history has been designed with utility in mind whilst womenswear has always been — and continues to be — more concerned with appearances. Read between the lines and this disparity only serves to reinforce outdated ideas about a woman’s role in society: her purpose is decorative. By denying women functional pockets, the underlying message is that women don’t need to be resourceful or self-sufficient.

Pockets aren’t just pockets. They’re a symbol of autonomy and quiet acts of rebellion against the status quo. The recent push for pockets in womenswear isn’t driven by fashion trends but by a collective demand for equality. In today’s increasingly rightwing climate where women’s rights are under attack and we’re witnessing the mainstreaming of misogyny, pockets might not seem a worthy battle to fight. But continuing to rail against micro-injustices is how we win the war.

On the surface, pockets in womenswear are a paltry concern but dig deeper and you’ll find a troubling lineage of gender politics stitched into every seam.

As teenagers, my friends and I spent our Friday nights stomping the streets of Brighton, trying our luck at every nightclub until we found a bouncer fool enough to let us in. We had all sorts of tactics up our sleeves, from fake IDs pilfered from older sisters to playing the parts of Russian tourists who didn’t speak a word of English (a pretence that would have been easily foiled had just one bouncer known that “passport” was the same in both languages).

Most importantly, we dressed the part. It was the early noughties when office wear and clubwear intersected, and no Friday night outfit was complete without a pair of battered stilettos. Utterly convinced were we that those extra inches would be all it took to hoodwink the burly bouncers who stood in between us and a night of underage drinking.

Often we’d end up staggering from one end of the city centre to the other and back again, too broke to pay for taxis and preferring to save our pennies for shots of sambuca and bottles of Smirnoff Ice. Come 3am, the balls of my feet would be burning with the intensity of a thousand tiny hellfires. More often than not, I walked the mile and a half home barefoot.

Dressed as the titular character, Robin Williams exclaimed in Mrs Doubtfire, “Jesus! If I find the misogynistic bastard that invented heels, I’ll kill him!”. Only the inventor of heels wasn’t a creative male chauvinist; in fact, the first heeled shoes were invented in the 10th century, and contrary to Robin Williams’ belief, they were originally intended for men. Persian cavalry soldiers wore heeled shoes called “galesh”, not for their leg-enhancing abilities but rather to improve their grip in stirrups. Today, you’ll spot the same angled heel on western boots, still serving its original purpose – even if most people wearing them wouldn’t know a horse from a Shetland pony.

From India — where platformed footwear called “paduka” indicated the wearer’s high status — to medieval Europe – where wooden clogs known as “pattens” kept workers’ lower extremities above the mud and dirt – heeled shoes have been found on feet belonging to both men and women throughout history. In 15th-17th century Venice, courtesans and respectable women alike teetered through the cobblestone alleys donning “chopines”, platform shoes initially serving the same purpose as pattens but later coming to represent the wearer’s social standing (pun intended). In short, the higher the platform, the higher the status (don’t hate me, the puns just write themselves).

One of the most enduring appeals of heels throughout history is their almost magical ability to make even the shortest legs appear longer and lither. In fact, in 17th-century Massachusetts, this optical illusion was considered akin to magic, and a law was once declared that any woman enticing a man into marriage using the seductive power of high heels would be tried as a witch. Some argue the law is urban legend and little credible evidence exists that it was ever passed. Still, it speaks volumes about the paranoia female sexuality has long stoked in patriarchal societies.

Across the Atlantic, Victorian author John Brookes made a similar claim that the Brits in 1770 passed an act subjecting women who used high heels or other cosmetic enhancements to the same punishment as witches. Fact or folklore, the pervasive fear that women wield such ruinous power over men is, let’s face it, utterly risible. Whether the men truly believed the women were witches or (more likely) were just pissed off at being either dumped or spurned, history shows they’d sooner blame the supernatural than own their emotions. Meanwhile, an innocent woman found herself condemned simply for liking how she felt in her medieval Manolos.

Heels didn’t carry the same sexual connotations in contemporaneous Europe, where they took off as a fashion item amongst men wanting to flaunt their high status (and their shapely calves). Only the richest and most extravagant of French dandies could afford to wear such impractical footwear, and wealthy women soon wanted in on the action. Men would come to favour a thicker heel while women wore thinner heels, the latter of which became a symbol of femininity by the end of the 18th century.

Elsewhere in the world, heels were used to elevate femininity in other ways. In Qing dynasty China, Manchu women wore “flowerpot shoes”, tapered platform heels that forced the wearer to delicately teeter about — as we women are naturally prone to do.

By the 20th century, heels were widely worn by women of all social standings in cultures around the world. Initially intended for men (who, aside from a brief revival in the 1960s and ‘70s, largely swapped them in favour of flats and fibs about their height), they began to be marketed as a tool to help women appear taller, more powerful, and more polished. That they also slow us down and leave us semi-crippled after several hours’ wear was a detail conveniently left out of the advertising.

Even today, many corporate dress codes still require female employees to wear high heels in the workplace. When plenty of comfortable and smart flat shoe styles exist, what purpose this could serve other than to control and sexualise women in male-dominated spaces under the guise of professionalism is unclear. On a subliminal level, it could be that forcing us to focus on our looks and preoccupying us with our discomfort makes us less of a threat. High heels might make us look good, but they limit our ability to do much else.

Of course, some women like to wear heels. Whether it’s for the feeling of poise and power, to add height, or that their personal style demands it, they train their feet to withstand the effects of balancing their body weight on a surface area not fit for purpose. Like people who run ultra-marathons or give birth unmedicated, these women present a tough, almost super-human front that us lesser mortals can only marvel at.

Today, heels walk a complicated line. Visit any fashion-forward city and you’re more likely to see sneaker-clad women opting for comfort over cramming their feet into a pair of skyscraper stilettos. With no social requirement to wear them, more often than not, we choose not to. Still, most women reserve a stash for special occasions when the fit or photo opportunities make the burning soles worth it. “Beauty is pain”, goes the adage (from the French Il faut souffrir pour être belle, meaning that “One must suffer to be beautiful”), and from Botox injections to Jimmy Choos, women have long known the cost of seeking beauty ideals.

The history of heels has been dark at times — a seemingly innocuous fashion item once intended for men that ultimately became a tool to demonise, sexualise, exploit, and control women. Today, greater gender equality has given us the right to choose what we wear on our feet, and those who don heels do so either without knowledge of their past or with acceptance of it.

For many, they’re just shoes.

As for me, I swapped my stilettos for sneakers many moons ago. Not because of their impracticality or their problematic past, but because I realised I could stand tall (and get into nightclubs) without them. I may dust them off when the occasion demands it — and count my blessings that the only consequences my footwear choices carry are burning soles and not a burning at the stake.

Within hours of giving birth to my baby earlier this year, I learned why sleep deprivation is used as a form of psychological torture. Getting my “beauty sleep” is a luxury I can no longer afford – for the next several to eighteen years at least (melting face emoji). The thought alone is exhausting; my only solace being that it’s a hardship shared by nearly all parents of infants.

A good night’s sleep has long been considered the elixir of radiance. The Ancient Greek physician and philosopher Hippocrates (of the Hippocratic Oath fame) recognised sleep as one of the six fundamental prerequisites for maintaining health (alongside air, food and drink, exercise and rest, retention and evacuation, and passions and emotions). He believed that too much or too little could cause imbalance, and while he didn’t explicitly refer to “beauty sleep” (a term coined in 1828 by author Charles White in his book Herbert Milton and referring to characters getting enough rest to maintain their looks), he understood sleep’s restorative power. And if the statues and vases are to be taken at face (or six-pack) value, the Greeks knew a thing or two about staying in peak physical shape.

While the Greeks favoured tanned bodies glistening with olive oil, the Elizabethans, some couple of thousand years later, preferred pale, unmarked skin – and how better to achieve a creamy, unblemished complexion than with a good night’s sleep? However, unlike the eight hours that we consider the gold standard today, sleep in Elizabethan England was often divided into two periods – ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’ – a pattern known as biphasic sleep (and first mentioned in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400). If sleep alone didn’t help you to achieve porcelain skin, there was always lead-based white paint, which the nobility – and famously the “Virgin Queen”, Elizabeth I – were wont to slather themselves in. Ironically, this coveted cosmetic dried out the skin, leading to cracking, flaking, and sores, side effects the portrait painters conveniently airbrushed out.

Across the English Channel (or La Manche, depending on where you live) in 18th-century France, Queen Marie Antoinette indulged in a characteristically elaborate skincare routine, which involved wearing gloves filled with wax, rose water, and sweet almond oil to bed each night. But not even the softest hands in all the land could save the doomed queen from the guillotine. In contrast, her compatriot Napoleon Bonaparte reportedly slept just three to four hours a night, a habit which may have contributed to Joseph Farington’s description in 1802 of his complexion “wanting in colour”.

Later that century, the Victorians smeared animal fat on their skin before settling down for the night in an effort to restore youthfulness. Lard or goose fat was believed to soften the skin, prevent wrinkles, and restore plumpness by morning. Such ointments might sound off-putting by modern standards, but let’s not be too quick to judge. Some of today’s most exclusive skincare products contain ingredients such as bee venom, snail slime, and even baby foreskin (or at least cells derived from neonatal foreskin, which, it’s claimed, stimulate collagen production, promote skin healing, and improve skin texture and tone).

Across the ages, sleep has been regarded as a time for rejuvenation, an opportunity to reset and awaken a refreshed version of oneself. This notion is perhaps rooted in the belief that a new day presents a clean slate, and tackling it with a reinvigorated mind and brighter complexion offers hope that we can achieve tomorrow what we didn’t today. When we look in the mirror, we want to see the best, brightest version of ourselves – not a wan visage with bloodshot eyes staring back at us. Sleep is the remedy that restores the face we want to present to the world.

Today, “beauty sleep” is almost exclusively marketed to women. The pressure to wake up looking rested and five years younger than you did the day before – regardless of whether you’ve been up half the night battling insomnia or with a new baby – remains deeply gendered. Worth over 640 billion dollars, the beauty industry claims to bottle what a few good nights’ sleep and a daily dose of vitamin D provide for free. And when one product doesn’t work, it’s all too easy to tempt women seeking their lost youth and unrealistic beauty standards to spend their hard-earned money on another.

But the concept of beauty sleep isn’t just chasing the dragon – we know now that sleep regenerates cells, reduces cortisol, boosts collagen, and brightens skin tone. It’s a panacea that does more for the complexion than any silk pillow or night cream ever will. Those of us who are denied it can cling to the hope that one day we settle down for the night and wake up the next morning looking like our Instagram posts would have people believe. And until then, there’s always caffeine, concealer, and a good photo editing app.

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