Tartan color coordination ideas - help appreciated!

[OC Richard]

my tartan is Irish Heritage and I'm having trouble thinking of what hose/flashes to color-coordinate and match...

This topic comes up often, and to address it I have to put my Artist cap on (I'm a professional artist).

The first thing it to consider the meanings of the words coordinate and match.

People will use them as synonyms but actually their meanings are in opposition.

Match means putting colours as identical to each other together.

Coordinate means juxtaposing different colours so that they create colour-harmonies.

It's like having all the members of a musical ensemble play the identical note simultaneously, as opposed to having them play the various member-notes of a chord simultaneously.

Here is matching. It is, to me, uninteresting in the extreme.



To create a nice look in a Saxon suit you would coordinate the colours of the shirt and tie, not match.

Highland Dress is the same; here's a matching Highland outfit



The other extreme is having several colours clashing horribly



Between these extremes is the happy middle ground.

Note with the centre gent that the colours of his kilt (blue, green, and black) are NOT repeated in his hose, jacket, hat, or tie.

Yet the outfit as a whole works somehow. How can this be? It's coordination.



With apologies for using myself as an example, note that the footwear colours (blue and claret) and the tie colours (blue and yellow) do not appear in the tartan (green, black, brown, purple, pale grey)



Likewise here the hose-colour (claret) does not appear in the tartan



And for myself, if wearing a predominately green kilt, that colour probably wouldn't make an appearance in whatever outfit I put together.

IMHO the Irish pipe band St Lawrence O Toole does a fantastic job at putting together an outfit based around a green kilt.

The colour green appears nowhere else in the outfit.

Their hose and waistcoats are grey. A brilliant touch are the claret bag-covers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FAMrXCbnZ4

My favourite Highland outfit of all time is this gent, c1870. The kilt-colours (green, blue, and black) are not repeated in his jacket (brown) or his hose (red and yellow) yet somehow the outfit comes together beautifully.



And it's always been that way in the army; since the raising of The Black Watch in the early 18th century that tartan (green, blue, black) has usually been worn with red & white hose, and red jackets