How Many Years in the Switch from Box to Knife Pleat?

[M. A. C. Newsome]

For the same reason as they perpetuated knife-pleated to the stripe: Economics. It takes much less fabric to pleat Black Watch, Gordon, Hunting Stewart, or Mackenzie to the stripe than to the sett. If you're making many kilts at once, the savings would add up quickly.

I've heard this argument, but I've never really bought it. For one, the amount of cloth saved in pleating to the stripe (vs. to the sett) is nominal, to say the least.

For another, pleating the stripe pre-dates pleating to the sett by a good 100 years or more, so it is not as if pleating to the stripe was introduced as a "low cost, easy alternative" to pleating to the sett.

The earliest tailored kilts that survive to this day are military kilts from the 1790s. They contain about 4 yards of cloth (some less) and are box pleated to the stripe.

Civilian kilts from the same period were pleated to NOTHING -- to no pattern at all. So you cannot really make the argument at this point that the military used pleating to the stripe to save cloth. You can argue that it was done for uniformity, though, as pleating to a regular stripe certainly does lend a more uniform look that the random pleating that was seen in contemporary civilian kilts.

Civilian kilts adopted pleating to the stripe sometime around 1815-20 or thereabouts. And for the remainder of the nineteenth century pleating to the stripe was the norm for civilian and military kilts, whether they be box pleated or knife pleated, four yards, five yards, six yards or what have you.

I would argue that the reason pleating to the stripe was maintained by the military - as well as the older box pleating style - is that the military has a built in tendency to hold fast to tradition, much more so than civilian fashion.