Tried-and-tested fashion advice from Mr Rabbie Burns.

It’s that time of year when two traditions, one ancient, one modern, clatter forcefully and contradictorily into each other.

In the fun corner, dating back a couple of hundred years, is Burns Night, the annual celebration of the life and rhymes of Mr Robert “Rabbie” Burns, Scotland’s national poet. Held on 25 January, it’s an event marked in parishes far beyond the Scottish borders, mainly because it’s a fantastic opportunity, at a particularly excitement-lite time of year, for drinking, feasting, versifying, dancing and did I mention the drinking?

In the tiresome corner, a not-so-dusty relic of the puritanical Noughties (or thereabouts), Dry January, the annual purging of the toxins and guilt accrued in the preceding festive season (and, probs, most of the months before that, too). The only way the modern gentleman can do Dry January and honour Mr Burns is to push his Burns Supper to 1 February. As MR PORTER’s resident Scotsman, it’s in my gift to sanction such calendar jiggery-pokery. You have my McBlessing. You’re welcome.

Meanwhile, don’t look to Mr Burns for any sage advice on how to combine merriment and sobriety. The Bard of Ayrshire liked his ale as he liked his women: by the yard. But the father of nine (or thereabouts) was as dandy as they come. So, as January is also the time for another tradition – a rebooting of one’s personal wardrobe and style – there are some fashion tips to be had from the often impoverished ploughman. Mr Burns’ old Scots dialect can be hard to fathom, so here are some helpful translations-slash-interpretations for top-of-the-year style notes.

Don’t be distracted by short skirts

Mr Burns’ epic – his Exile On Main St, his Sopranos, his Once Upon A Time In The West (of Scotland) – is “Tam O’ Shanter”. It’s named after the bonnet later, ah, popularised by Mr Russ Abbot, but is here the name of our titular hero. It’s a post-pub horror story in which Mr O’ Shanter stumbles home after another boozy night in the tavern. He has some form drinking with local hottie Kirkton Jean so, lest he encounter a most unamused Mrs O’ Shanter, he and his horse Meg take a detour via a haunted church. Therein Mr O’ Shanter espies various supernatural beings partying like it’s 1791. A witch he considers a particularly “winsome wench” catches his eye. She’s dressed in a “scanty” paisley pattern mini-skirt – a “cutty-sark” – so our over-refreshed wanderer shouts out his sartorial approval. All hell breaks loose (literally), and Mr O’ Shanter scarpers sharpish. He escapes with his life, and his bonnet, but poor Meg loses her tail.

Cleanliness is next to trendiness

Ms Nelly Kilpatrick was a neighbour of young Master Burns, the daughter of the village blacksmith and the bard’s co-worker in the fields at harvest time. “Handsome Nell” was, accordingly, one of his earliest compositions. In it, Mr Burns set out the aspects of personal style that mattered to him: “She dresses aye sae clean and neat/Both decent and genteel/An’ then there’s something in her gait/Gars ony dress look weel.” That is, the way Ms Kilpatrick walked and the way she held herself increased the attractiveness of anything in her wardrobe. Plus, her personal hygiene was second to none, which is saying something for a farmhand in dirt-poor Scotland in the 1700s. Handsome, indeed.

Get ahead, get a (better) hat

No tittering at the back. Perhaps Mr Burns’ most fashion-forward poem is “Cock Up Your Beaver”. A beaver being a type of hat, while to cock it is to primp it up (but you knew that). It concerns young Johnie, a gauche arriviste who starts the poem sporting makeweight millinery. Eight lines later he is peacock-proud, courtesy of style pointers from some anonymous 18th-century MR PORTER. Altogether now: “When first my brave Johnie lad came to this town/He had a blue bonnet that wanted the crown/But now he has gotten a hat and a feather/Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver!/Cock up your beaver, and cock it fu’ sprush/We’ll over the border and gie them a brush/There’s somebody there we’ll teach better behaviour/Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver!”

Style comes from the inside

Mr Burns was a radical, a champion of the working man, a democratic defender of individuality and of the spirit. In his declaratory, rousing “A Man’s A Man For A’ That”, he told it like it is. To his mind, it ultimately mattered not a jot the fancy food we eat, or the finery or “tinsel show” we wear. “What though on hamely fare we dine/Wear hoddin grey, and a’ that,” he wrote, where “hoddin” is coarse, homespun cloth, “Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine/A man’s a man for a’ that.” Amen to that.

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