Hose to Kilt Combo

[GG]

Even if I do have kilt hose in different colours, by far the most worn are charcoal; they go with all my different tartans - and shirts - and they don't take attention from my kilts.

[BobF]

I was wearing charcoal hose, and I tend to avoid white/cream, but these amazing hose showed up in Facebook Marketplace at a very reasonable price, and I was quite taken by them. From what I could find, the company is a small one that uses local wool and recruits local knitters to produce their products. I’m rather tickled to know that these hose were knitted by “Mrs. Jarvis.” Any small inconsistencies just show that they were knitted by hand rather than machine. I couldn’t resist.

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[GG]

To me, they look good, Bob.

[User]

I was wearing charcoal hose, and I tend to avoid white/cream, but these amazing hose showed up in Facebook Marketplace at a very reasonable price, and I was quite taken by them. From what I could find, the company is a small one that uses local wool and recruits local knitters to produce their products. I’m rather tickled to know that these hose were knitted by “Mrs. Jarvis.” Any small inconsistencies just show that they were knitted by hand rather than machine. I couldn’t resist.

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For about $3 you can dye those to any color you wish.

[BobF]

For about $3 you can dye those to any color you wish.

So obvious, and yet something I hadn’t considered. I’ll have to give that some thought.

[Arnot]

I'm just sort of wondering if anyone views this colour differently in this sort of hose as opposed to those at hire shops.

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[Jock Scot]

I'm just sort of wondering if anyone views this colour differently in this sort of hose as opposed to those at hire shops.

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They still look white to me Troy, but not the blinding white of the hire shop variety.

[OC Richard]

Therefore, it might be a good idea to start with the kilt, then choose a suitable 'top' to go with it, and from there decide upon kilt hose colour, in order that the whole combo shall look at its best.

Exactly so, that's the custom that I mentioned earlier, often mentioned in the literature and often seen in paintings and photographs (going back to the mid-19th century) of matching the hose colour to the jacket colour.

In the days when the "top" was invariably the jacket, due to men rarely going out in public in shirtsleeves or a jumper.

The tartan, it seems, made no part in these decisions.

[OC Richard]

...these amazing hose showed up in Facebook Marketplace at a very reasonable price, and I was quite taken by them. From what I could find, the company is a small one that uses local wool and recruits local knitters to produce their products. I’m rather tickled to know that these hose were knitted by “Mrs. Jarvis.” Any small inconsistencies just show that they were knitted by hand rather than machine. I couldn’t resist.

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Oh well do I remember that fad!!

I started playing in pipe bands and attending Highland Games in the 1970s.

At that time Highland "day dress" hose were fairly or entirely plain, often with a subtle pattern knit into the cuffs, and available in a limited range of colours.

These colours varied over time a bit:

1860s: observed are taupe, mid-grey, charcoal

1930s: "a colour to tone with the jacket" observed are Lovat green, Lovat blue, Fawn

1950s, the earliest catalogue I have which lists available colours: Lovat blue, Lovat green, Fawn

late 1970s/early 1980s catalogues list: Lovat blue, Lovat green, Fawn, Bottle green, Navy blue, Ecru (AKA Cream AKA Offwhite)

So that's the hose you would see worn with Day Dress. (Evening Dress of course called for tartan full hose.)

I think it was in the late 1970s that we in our pipe band world saw a Canadian band wearing those heavy hand-knit "Arran" hose in "natural" colour. We thought it was the coolest thing ever.



They became a huge international pipe band fad, to the extent that if you were wearing the old-school Lovat or Fawn hose people would think you'd crawled out from under a rock.

The Kilt Hire shops couldn't afford the expensive and slow-to-get-made hand-knit Arran hose, so they all went for offwhite/cream/ecru cheap machine-knit hose.

Then in the late 1980s the Wheels of Fashion turned (as they always do) and suddenly all the famous Grade One Scottish pipe bands were switching to the new pure-white plain hose with "popcorn" knit tops. Now bands that WERE wearing the Arran hose looked like they'd come from some piping backwater somewhere.



By the late 1990s every single Grade One pipe band the world over was wearing the new pure-white hose, and Kilt Hire shops were all issuing plain machine-knit pure white hose. Thus the hated White Hose Hegemony was instituted.

But the Wheels of Fashion turned again and starting around 2010 the Anything-But-White era began, which period we're still in.



All of this is just to give people who didn't live through these convolutions of fashion some perspective, which might explain some of the reactions you get to your lovely Arran hose. (I have a pair too, lurking in a drawer.)

BTW to those who might say "the pipe band fashions have nothing to do with civilian fashions as a whole" I'm prepared to post a pile of photos of non-pipe-band-people wearing these exact hose at the exact points in time that the pipe bands were.

[Tomo]

A lot of my hose are custom made - mainly because I like the look of diced hose cuffs. So inevitably this involves some choice of colour.

These were intended to match the colours of the kilt(s):


These were intended to match the jacket:


These were intended to be more neutral: