Jacket Color?

[The Wizard of BC]

One of the really great things about this forum is that it is very picture heavy. You can get a really good sense of fashion and style by looking though the pictures here.

With that said - One of the most common fashion mistakes I see almost every day is the thinking that just because we put a kilt on - that everything else in our outfits must now match or 'go' with our kilt.

We don't do this with pants.

But we do want the kilt to be the center of our outfits. We want the kilt to shine. One of our members approached this from an artist viewpoint and it is valid.

If you build all the colors of your outfit around the colors of your kilt, the kilt is pushed to the background. It blends into everything else.

Let the kilt shine.

I use the phrase "Color coordinate" when I talk about building an outfit. You want the entire outfit to coordinate. Not match, not be the same but to look good when put next to each other.

So I show guys that if they lay out their shoes, hose, shirt, tie, & jacket and everything looks good together the outfit will work. And it will go with almost any Tartan.

Another thing I do is show them pics of a wedding in Scotland. Almost everyone in the wedding party will be in the same hose, shirt, tie, jacket but each will have his own Tartan. And it all works.

And another trick I do is show them the outfit I am wearing that day. My hose are usually coordinated with my shirt. I can then go to my racks and pull off any Tartan, hold it up in front of myself - And viola! It still works.

So don't get too wrapped up in worrying about color. As said before in this thread those from white through the grays to black 'go' with everything. A black jacket will work just as well as a gray jacket.
Black is usually considered a step more formal than gray. Gray in the daytime and black in the evening thing.

We all seem to go through that phase of worrying about the 'correct' color. I am convinced that this comes from the photos that were posted in the early days of the internet. Everyone was dressed the same. That has far more to do with the fact that there were very few makers of kilt accessories then. There was little to choose from. For formal wear there was only the Prince Charlie. For everything else there was the Black Barathea Argyle. For daywear there were only Lovat Blue and Lovat Green tweed jackets. Everyone was in stark white hose or hand-knit cable hose. It's no wonder that so many came to believe that there was some sort of uniform rules, some "right and wrong" way to wear a kilt.

If nothing else, this forum has gotten people to break out of that 'uniform', 'right and wrong' way of thinking.