Border dancers, being the dark side of Morris, traditionally wear black outfits comprising coats, trousers, kilts or dresses, often with suitably grungy fishnets and big boots. Coats are decorated with long strips of material called tatters. A few sides only use black tatters but most have coloured ones using colours appropriate to them. Outfits are usually topped off with decorated top hats often featuring tall pheasant feathers so border dancers can seem to be 10′ tall!
We’ve adopted the colours on the City of Bath’s coat of arms so our jackets have mainly red and blue tatters with odd white, silver and gold ones picking up the coat of arms’ other colours. Our top hats have red and blue bands and are decorated to each person’s fancy.
Guidance on how to make your outfit for new members is here.
Finally, Border dancers originally painted their faces black as a disguise while dancing (they were begging for money which was illegal). Border dancers still use face paints and we use simple blue and red steaks of colour across our cheeks.
