My first Kilt article.

[OC Richard]

The point is, male dress wasn't always trousers.

Exactly! That Stewart guy was implying that the only doctrinally acceptable clothing is the stuff HE happens to wear!

Blue jeans and slacks as we wear today haven't been around very long, but Stewart implies that anything else is forbidden.

Men have worn togas and robes for thousands of years, and all the men in Biblical times would have done. (Or maybe Stewart imagines that all those guys wore blue jeans?)

The only bifurcated things in Judea might have been trews-like things that the Roman military copied from the Germans/Celts (but only worn in cold weather) or actual trews worn by Germanic/Celtic slaves (there's a painting of a Celtic slave wearing patterned trews in a Roman site in North Africa).

(I say "Germanic/Celtic" because the Roman writers often confused the two groups, and just which group the Romans were referring to in a particular reference is often open to debate. It gets really sticky because Deutsche is a cognate with Tuath which both mean "fellow countrymen".)

About the clerical collar, I'd assumed (not knowing anything about it) that it was simply a vestige of wearing a white shirt or neckcloth under an ordinary stand collar (what nowadays we call a Nehru collar) on a black coat.