When to wear it all?

1) Any really big investiture ceremony, coronation, etc.
2) a formal portrait (Charles Dance in WHITE MISCHIEF)
3) a Zoolander inspired tartan walk-off.


A bridegroom or father of the bride might as well pile it on- remember those pics of the McGregor and his bride?

I think, as we get older, some of us channel our competitive drives into the way we dress. Sometimes, we think to ourselves as we survey the dog's breakfast of options laid out by our valets, "Will there be people there who understand elegant simplicity, as embodied by a well tailored Regulation, or are these the kind of people who need to be hit over the head with a little red velvet?

_ . _


I know there are traditional arguments that will excuse any mashup of color so long as it can be blamed on the tartans all having the same clan designation (no matter how spurious the authority for that designation) while condemning some aestheticallly pleasing match because of a nineteenth century clerical whim. All i can say is that color knows no clan.

The generic tartan/argyle hose like National Scot would appear to have this principle in mind. If your tartan is red, blue, and green, for example, with three narrow white stripes, you may be able to find someone who will run you up a pair of hose with that tricky white triple raker, for a few hundred pounds, or you can buy a pair of hose that include the colors, like the National Scot. Technically speaking, they do not "match" and they are not Your tartan, but they look just fine- in fact, they look GOOD.

If you start browsing through tartan swatches, it is pretty easy to find several tartans using the same few colors, only spaced differently. Sometimes the differences are easy to spot- Royal Stewart and MacLeod of Harris, for example. Somebody else can list the trickier and more easily confused ones. I have no idea whether fighting men ever relied on their ability to distinguish these subtleties or stood around on the battlefield counting stripes. I would rather not.

As more and more people design and register tartans from the same finite palette of colors, there will be more and more complicated combinations.

In an ideal world, we would all wear one tartan, reflecting Universal Brotherhood, or we could choose to wear any tartan, reflecting our freedom. But in THIS world, the all wise and all seeing Kilt Police look into our closetsw and into our hearts and make sure that the Sobieski Stuarts didn't work all of those hours translating and transcribing for nothing. AREN'T YOU GLAD?