Universal hose color?

[OC Richard]

About "coordinating" shirt and hose, if you mean contrasting colours that coordinate, yes indeed.

Matching shirt and hose, on the other hand, sometimes works well and sometimes doesn't. Seems to me that usually it's a stronger overall effect if the jacket, shirt, hose, and kilt are all different colours, but somehow coordinate.

Having the hose and shirt match looks especially bad in pipe bands wearing waistcoats without jackets, longsleeved white shirts, and white hose. When on the march all the swinging long white arms and swinging long white legs really jump out at the eye and look like a chaotic mess. It's one of the reasons pipe bands wearing white hose look so much better in blue shirts.

In the photos I posted above, I think the Army uniform and my Isle of Skye outfit are stronger for having nothing match. In the bottom photo the grey hose and shirt make the Roxburgh kilt look more dull than it is- the danger of wearing hose too close in colour to one of the tartan's main colours.

Note that the Burgundy hose, not matching anything in the Isle of Skye tartan, allow the tartan's colours to shine out.