I'm new at this. One of the first things that I've been made aware of is that, as in other areas of life, the map is not the territory.

The succinct rules that I've seen quoted have either been too vague or too specific to provide comprehensive, cook-book directions about what to wear in every situation. I didn't learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book, either. The words 'always' and 'never' have become red flags: they tell me to investigate further what the writer is trying to convey. Can I find a historical basis for wearing almost anything? Sure, but why buy and wear an expensive garment in a particular tartan the wearing of which which might provoke arguments?

There are hundreds of tartans that look great. There might be only a small chance of mistakenly wearing a tartan from a clan whose chief would really prefer that only clan members wear it. There's at most a vanishingly small risk that some hypothetical young member of such a clan, taking something he's read to extremes, might come striding across the field at a highland games to punch me in the back of the head. That's not going to happen; I'm using hyperbole to illustrate what I mean.

What I mean is this: I'll be most comfortable in a tartan that reflects my own affiliations. That might be a place in which I've lived, a place from which my ancestors came, a place whose history fascinates me or (in my case) USAK's Firefighters' Memorial tartan. I acknowledge that such specificity might be excessive; it's a quirk of mine. Moreover, I believe that I've seen a link here to a web page with a clan chief's explicit statement that anyone in the world was welcome to wear his clan's tartan if they wished to do so.

Rather than planning to follow a particular set of written rules exactly, I'm here to learn from the wise and the informed how the kilt is really worn. Learning about the ways by which I might inadvertently 'push someone else's buttons' is part of that. The key, for me, is to read the views of those who really know what they are doing, and I particularly enjoy their photographs of what works.