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I mean, you can frame national dress and national identity that way, sure. But it seems awfully uncharitable.
Is every Bavarian wearing lederhosen or a dirndl thinking about how unlike the Berliners they are? When the Japanese wear kimonos to weddings and festivals, are they mainly thinking about they're not like China or Korea?
Or is it only Scottish national dress that gets defined in this way?
Scots wear the national dress the same way every country's national dress gets worn. I can't think of a single country where the national dress is worn as everyday clothing. We all wear blue jeans and business suits as part of global culture.
Well, right there is one: the United States. Jeans and a t shirt are, in a very real sense, my national costume. Of course, if I put on cowboy boots and a stetson with the jeans, that would be a change again towards a national costume, and I'd be conscious that I'm dressing differently from the default of "clothing." Or, moreso for me, if I put on a pastel polo shirt and pop the collar, with Nantucket red chinos, pull on a navy blazer and a pair of sperries, I'm at some level putting on the ritz to dress most like myself, and I'm conscious when doing so of being different from other people in the street.
Which is where my question is coming from. I wake up in the morning and I put on pants and a shirt and a jacket. I'm self conscious of variety of pants-shirt-jacket I'm putting on, when I put on chinos and a polo I'm aware that I'm dressing differently than when I wear joggers and a wifebeater and differently again than a suit and a dress shirt. But the core paradigm of pants-shirt-jacket remains the same. Stepping outside of that paradigm is stepping outside of default "clothing" and into a national costume.
The kilt is the most obvious step completely outside of that paradigm of men's dressing. And I'm wondering when the last scotsmen lived who just woke up in the morning and put on a kilt because that's "clothing" to him, rather than putting on a kilt as a national costume. Maybe, as @2rafa points out, that never really happened. But the Japanese example fits in there as well: at some point in the 20th century putting on a kimono became a differently understood act when the default of "clothing" became pants-shirt-jacket in the western paradigm. When was the last Japaner born who woke up and put on a kimono without any intent of being traditional?
I'm tempted to say 'never'. Clothing has always been an expression of identity, whether the identifying characteristic is ethnicity, nationality, sex, age, wealth, profession, religion or any others you can think of. A muslim woman who wears a headscarf does so as her everyday dress, but it is also explicitly religious/ethnic dress.
The Scottish highlanders wore kilts for hundreds of years because they were practical, but they were also aware the entire time that the lowlanders didn't wear kilts. The identity around the kilt was no doubt strengthened during the Jacobite rebellion and during its aftermath (when it was banned by the government in order to suppress highland identity). So if you want a a particular date for when the kilt became more symbolic than day-to-day, I'd say then.
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