Many of the Finnish national dresses of Karelian area are based on real items of clothing. Could a national dress therefore be your ruutat?
GOOD QUESTION, short answer is no but maybe you can use parts of it, long answer is here:
Let's take Rautjärvi for an example. Both of these ladies wear a version of it, there's also another apron, and of course the veil for grown up women.
Karelia area national dresses are roughly divided into two different groups, the Äyrämöinen and the Savakko. The example is Kannas-Karelia Savakko style, but all the points apply to both styles.
To be considered ruutat, your outfit needs to tell certain things about you. But wait, a national dress can do the same!
Well - yes and no.
1) Area of origin. Ruutat needs to immediately communicate where you, your family, or the family you've become a part of is from. Clothes were a massive investment, so people didn't always change their ruutat even when marrying to another family (though this was possible if both families agreed). For this reason, different area ruutat were not mixed.
National dress can show your area of origin... and also not. Finnish national dress has no such origin rule as ruutat does, anyone can wear any dress they like, and you don't even have to have any connection to Finland to wear one. We may ban you from wearing underwear with lace when in national dress, but we don't care where you're from.
As an example, our family has a Sääksmäki dress for a young girl, that goes from one girl to the next once you grow out of it. Not one person in my family has any ties to Sääksmäki, but great-great-aunt really loved how the dress looked. So.
A national dress is not a confirmation of your origin area.
2) Marital status. Ruutat tells this at a glance, and occasionally even your intentions, such as are you maybe looking for someone or are you dedicating your life to singlehood from now on. As the world changes, so does ruutat, if something new needs to be communicated relationship status -wise.
National dress can communicate this too... well, often. Not always. All national dresses don't even have a way of differentiating between married and unmarried, and today the recommendation is actually girl vs. grown-up instead of unmarried vs. married.
Add to this that there's no rule to which marker (usually headwear) you choose. For a longest time people refused the "married" women's headdresses because that looked aunty, and wore the silk ribbons instead. Nothing stops you from doing this even today, your headdress is entirely up to you, and some women even don't wear any (shock! horror! harlotry!).
A national dress therefore doesn't reliably communicate your marital status.
3) The amount of children you have. This sometimes comes as a surprise, but some area ruutat has this option!
And - in a way - the national dress does too. Uh. That is, in case all your children completed highschool, the lyre brooch is technically speaking not allowed BUT since medals are allowed to be worn with national dress, some mothers consider this brooch their medal. It's... a bit old-fashioned and going out though, so I was hesitating even mentioning it. It's not a thing, it's a quirk at most, and entirely unrealiable: my grandma had five children, but her lyre brooch only had three lyres for her three daughters, as her sons did not go to highschool.
4) Your religion. The divide between Orthodox and Lutherans used to be very strict, and the two different kinds of clothes made it obvious which group you were. Ruutat can still be used to communicate this, in case you want to/are religious at all/belong to another religion entirely - as mentioned, ruutat changes according to what needs to be communicated. It's a living tradition, whereas a national dress is a set formal dress.
(In fact, if you go the history route you'll find so many ways Karelians used to not only communicate their side of Christianity, but also how serious they were about it.)
Most people who wear East national dresses don't really pay attention to this though, if they even know it's a thing. National dress does not reliably communicate your religion.
5) Ruutat is supposed to be personal. Even when a national dress would otherwise serve the purpose of ruutat, this is where it fails completely. All national dresses have to be made as identical as possible, and that takes your own self out.
There ARE ways a national dress or its patterns can be used to build ruutat, though! However, since this post is already kinda long, let's make it part 1 - part 2 will be about what you can do.
