Something that Hamish wrote years ago that stuck in my head

[KiltFitz]

Hm..

In fact, Kilt Fitz, I'm still in the habit of dropping in at XMTS, but find that after something like seven years, I have less and less to say. I have no problem with those who are enamoured of every detail, but after spending a lot of time accumulating such stuff and learning about it, have come to the conclusion that at the end of the day, it's still all just clothes. It's all just clothes and honestly, I don't really care all that much about clothes.

Regarding the rest of your post, It seem to me that Kilt Hire companies are businesses. They are in business to make money. If something doesn't make money I don't see why they should bother with it, and that goes for stocking 146 different clan waistcoats. Some people think that's terrible. I suppose those people don't run businesses.

Maybe, in the end, they're just clothes after all, like I suspected all along, and I have much more important things to spend my time worrying about.

It's difficult to engage with someone who qualifies everything they say with a caveat that they don't really care about it anyway. The written equivalent of whistling nonchalantly, I find it exudes anything but.

Businesses can be lazy, even greedy. Hire outlets are customers too, to their suppliers. There are a lot fewer suppliers every year and the quality offered rarely goes up. Nor does the choice offered. Their attitude to their own product is usually pretty obvious anyway. Walk into one of these outlets and count the members of staff with any form of kilt or highlandwear on. (I know you wouldn't because you live in California where nobody would rent clothes because it's a constant come-as-you-are arrangement but imagine you lived in a place where dress-code existed as an expression of respect).
Would you listen to an automobile salesperson pointing out all the features of a car who told you they had never got a driving licence?

Clan tartans are becoming ever more rare in hire collections now anyway. Fashion tartans make it much easier to narrow the choice down to colours which will match the flowers, and all the men can wander in wearing identical outfits looking like their mums tied their laces and buttoned up their shirts.

Maybe I care more although I certainly don't own as many kilts as you. I wear mine about 3 days out of seven. In Scotland. Glasgow, in fact. Where apparently we only wear them to weddings, and we certainly don't dress traditionally as a norm. Except that I do. So I could walk about looking identically every day with the same jacket and accessories or I can amuse myself and express my sartorial side with the plethora of options available to me.

To me, the concept of worry would be to put a jacket on and then change it because I thought people might look at the jacket more than my kilt. They are just clothes. They're my clothes. They don't have feelings, so what's this about 'let the kilt do the talking' or 'Thou must not overshadow the natural aesthetic power of the pleated garment'? With the deepest respect for Hamish, did he give you these thoughts on stone tablets or something?

Anyway, I also have things to worry about. We all do. When I'm on here, it's because I'm taking time away from those worries to engage in something I enjoy. Debate and conversation. I won't demean that by telling people on here that what they care to talk about shouldn't be important to them. If you feel you're too busy to be on here, and you find kilts and the whole thing draining, then maybe you identified your own solution already. Personally, I love it all. And yes, it is just clothes. That doesn't make me love it any less.

[ThistleDown]

That was an extreme edit, Alan, but thank you. You see, this isn't all about you, or about how you or any other of us wear the kilt in California or elsewhere in this wide world, but about the international forum called XMTS and how all of us -- from all over -- wear this 'garment', and how we wear it relative to where it is iconic. For many of us it is traditional dress, for some it is costume or uniform, and for others it is perhaps a rebellion against what is the 'norm' in their part of the world.

[Alan H]

Well, the rant about the C. Club was very unnecessary on this forum and had nothing to do with the topic, anyway. I'll spare you the reasons why I wrote it and we can all just be glad that I deleted it.

As for the rest of it, I'm just tired of the never-ending back and forth about the same old stuff, with the same old attitudes over and over and over again and I think that maybe this kinds of wraps it up for me. Who knows, we'll see.

[Jock Scot]

As for the rest of it, I'm just tired of the never-ending back and forth about the same old stuff, with the same old attitudes over and over and over again and I think that maybe this kinds of wraps it up for me. Who knows, we'll see.

Hi Alan. I know how you feel about talking about the same kilt stuff time and time again and for the last year the realisation began to dawn on me that there is only so much that anyone can talk about their slant on kilt matters and only so many times that one can do it. We all have our own views and frankly it is unlikely that any of us are ever going to change our particular slant on kilt matters by much and it is unreasonable to expect people so to do.

With a healthy website there is a steady influx of new members and it is as sure as night follows day that the same questions are asked and just assuredly the same people will answer the questions time and time again. Just occasionally a new member sticks around for long enough and starts to answer questions with his/her view on things. That is the reality of a website, particularly when kilt attire is such a small issue to discuss. This could be helped if the discussion base could be expanded in some way, but the fact is, the owner of this website has his own perfectly legitimate reasons for not doing so.

Now when I started here, traditional kilt attire was a minority subject and now, until recently at least , traditional kilt attire was a core subject here. In fact, I understand that this website has a reputation as a traditional kilt website, which does limit the conversation somewhat. No amount of micro management by the management and mods, or, hope, will ever change that until the members start to discuss the neglected kilt issues because they find a reason to discuss them and it seems that at the moment that they do not wish to. It could change back to how it used to be some 7/8 years ago, it could change easily, but only if enough members wish to lead it that way.

In the meantime, I hope you and plenty of the other "old lags" hang about and you never know one of us may even come up with a new slant on a well worn topic route!