Hose Height / How much knee?

[OC Richard]

I also wonder if it's because someone not used to kilt wearing feels exposed and so consciously or subconsciously pulls their hose up high and lowers the kilt.

Maybe they are unused to the relatively high position of the waist, and so wear it lower than intended by the maker.

Yes I think you're bang-on with both observations.

One wouldn't think so, especially while watching The Red Carpet arrivals at a Hollywood event, but an old puritanical element is alive and well somewhere down deep in the American psyche, especially in certain regions and among certain groups. An American who thinks nothing about wearing shorts and sandals and exposing most of his legs, well, when you put a kilt on him he suddenly becomes very modest!

And most Americans just can't get it into their heads that a kilt is not a pair of jeans. Heck, we've even invented Utility Kilts in order to cater to this desire to have kilts be like jeans! And traditional kilts? Well we'll tell the kiltmaker to make them shorter than they ought to be and wear them lower than they ought to be and have the kiltmaker put wide belt loops on them so we can wear belts to hold them up! (Of course if we wore them properly and had them made properly we wouldn't need belts.)

Rant over.