Bison hose in the 1860s

[OC Richard]

So on the way to a friend's wedding recently I stopped by our best local Highland Outfitter, RP Blandford & Son, and finally took the plunge and bought a pair of Cheviot "Bison" coloured hose.

My blue Cheviot hose have been my go-to hose for a couple years now, they're fantastic.

It dawned on me later just why the "Bison" colour looks so "right" to my eye: it's one of the very few colours in which selfcoloured Day hose appear in The Highlanders Of Scotland.

When I started kiltwearing in the 1970s all the retailers we had access to (which were mostly selling Lochcarron hose) sold the same limited range of colours

-cream/ecru/offwhite
-oatmeal
-Lovat green
-Lovat blue

I think that was pretty much it, from most retailers. Some also had bottle green, navy blue, black, and red.

This current range of offerings gives you the basic idea



Here in the 1955 Anderson catalogue the colour range is even more restricted, with "fawns Lovats and browns".



So it's interesting to look over The Highlanders Of Scotland and see that selfcoloured hose only appear in mid-grey, light grey, brown, and taupe. Tweed Day jackets also appear only in grey and brown.

Here



In contrast to the very narrow range of hose and jacket colours, THOS reveal a dazzling variety of jacket cuts, hat shapes, sporran designs, and shoe styles.

In our current Highland Dress you see the same cut of jacket over and over, the same hat shapes, the same shoes, but an unprecedented variety of hose colours.

In any case the current popularity of taupe/Bison and grey hose seems to be an unintentional revival of the mid-19th century situation.

[Tarheel]

You jumped started my logical lobe OC. Here is a photo of my "gardening t-shirt" (from an earlier thread on tucking in shirt tails).

The grey shirt is stained with the local red clay that is heavy with iron minerals. Kilt hose that began with a neutral shade, would retain the tones of the environmental soil types. If a pair of hose were the color of the land, they would hold that color more readily with extended use. I would be drawn to the shade of Bison or Taupe hose because they look like they belong here.
In the Mississippi Delta (where the rich alluvial clay-loam soil is called "gumbo") the stain on clothes is dark charcoal. A light grey hose there would darken. Thanks for the mental work out with your post.

[MacGumerait]

In any case the current popularity of taupe/Bison and grey hose seems to be an unintentional revival of the mid-19th century situation.

It would also be nice to see a revival of the brown tweed jackets .

[The Wizard of BC]

It would also be nice to see a revival of the brown tweed jackets .

Like this?

[MacGumerait]

Very nice Steve . However , I was thinking of brown tweeds that were in the color palette of your sporran .

Cheers , Mike

[OC Richard]

Like this?

I was thinking more like this ; )

[ASinclair]

I have a pair of Bison hose from House of Cheviot on my Christmas wish list.

[McMurdo]

You mean brown argyll's like this



or this



Good call on the Bison hose I have thought about them for a while and may need a pair at sometime soon.

[MacLowlife]

OC, don't you suppose those self colored hose were mostly knitted from undyed sheep's wool, hence varying colors of soft brown, oatmeal, tan, etc?

[OC Richard]

It never occurred to me to wonder why they are that colour. Don't know.

I find it so interesting that at that time, when they had vastly greater variety in jacket cut and shoe design and sporran design that today, they appeared to have only two colours for plain hose (taupe and grey) and only three colours for tweed kilt jackets (grey and brown).