badly pressed pleats ruins effect

[OC Richard]

I have noticed several times on Ebay old A&SH and Seaforth kilts being sold the pleats of which have obviously not been pressed in a long time and have lost all semblance of an edge. These pleats sort of look like a series of tubes across the back of the kilt, or more like a ruffle than kilt pleats.

The way military box pleats lie is complicated so I can imagine somebody wishing to spruce up their kilt by pressing the pleats but not knowing how to do it.

[Dixiecat]

Actually, they are actually box pleats, actually. :-)

They are simply box pleats made with 8 yards of cloth, rather than four.

An historic box pleated kilt, made from 4 yards of cloth, has wide box pleats which have little to no overlap and the pleats are equal depth on either side.

As you increase the yardage, you end up with more pleats, and more narrow pleats. There will be more overlap on the interior. And while side of the pleat will be deeper (due to the increased amount of cloth) the other side of the pleat will actually become more shallow.

So when you do this with a full 8 yards, the box pleats do indeed "look like" what we would expect a normal modern knife pleated kilt to look like, with the pleats twisted around. But it is, in fact, exactly what a box pleated kilt looks like when made from 8 yards of cloth.

In my world of sewing terms, military box pleating is a kind of misnomer. A box pleat is defined as two opposite pleats meeting. In my quest to get a grasp on what I was trying to say, I checked out these threads: http://www.xmarksthescot.com/forum/f...sporran-41024/
http://www.xmarksthescot.com/forum/f...80/index2.html
Both threads confirm that military box pleats are folded back knife pleats with the main pleats running in the same direction. HOWEVER, I can see though that a small 'box' is created by the folding of the knife pleat which is the sneaky way of validating the definition of box pleat.