From traditional to national dress

In the late 19th century urban lifestyles were spreading fast and making traditional peasant clothes obsolete. The intellectual leaders of the national awakening movement began to promote traditional peasant dress as a festive costume for Estonians, to celebrate national occasions and song festivals, making it thus an element in the construction of national identity.

Interest towards peasant dress grew until the 1880s, but declined towards the turn of the century due to the russification process. The 1920s saw a new phase in the importance of traditional dress, in connection with the movement of celebrating "genuine Estonian culture", to follow an example from the Nordic countries. Traditional dress was particularly foregrounded at the 1928 and 1933 national song festivals with strong interests towards reviving it.

The second phase of the development of traditional dress as a national costume began in the 1940s. National dress became a tool of conflicting ideologies. Culture had to be "national in form and socialist in content", and those guidelines affected also the use of traditional festive costume. It was governed by the Soviet centralization system of guidance, and were adopted as the general norm of song festivals. Because of also centralized and rigid manufacturing process, some of the costumes turned into widely disseminated "uniforms" (e.g. the recent Muhu women's costume).

On the other hand, Estonians wore traditional costumes to signal their national feelings that were offensive to the authorities. Estonians began to wear traditional dress as a national symbol again more manifestly at the turn of the 1970s and 80s under the circumstance of another russification phase, and particularly during the singing revolution and restoration of independence at the end of the 1980s. The peasant dress of old with its local varieties has become a national symbol today, as traditional costumes have continued to the present.