A Grandfather shirt or Granddad shirt is a long-sleeved flannel or brushed cotton collarless shirt worn throughout Ireland. Traditional shirts are white with coloured vertical stripes. Longer shirts are used as nightshirts or pajamas. The nightshirt version can include a matching nightcap. Most shirts have four buttons. The grandfather shirt and Aran jumper are part of the national costume of Ireland.
The grandfather shirt is also made of Irish linen. The linen version is colloquially known as a Sunday shirt. Sunday shirts are often paired with black trousers or Irish tweed pants and worn to mass, christenings, funerals, and weddings.
In popular culture, a variety of traditional Irish clothing was featured on the BBC series, Ballykissangel and the Irish folk band, The Clancy Brothers were often photographed wearing traditional Irish clothes.
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Famous quotes containing the words grandfather and/or shirt:
“Then, bringing me the joy we feel when wee see a work by our favorite painter which differs from any other that we know, or if we are led before a painting of which we have until then only seen a pencil sketch, if a musical piece heard only on the piano appears before us clothed in the colors of the orchestra, my grandfather called me the [hawthorn] hedge at Tansonville, saying, “You who are so fond of hawthorns, look at this pink thorn, isn’t it lovely?””
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)