Mystery Jacket

[Dr Bee]

Ha! Guilty as charged!

Not guily at all - my compliments to you on you rig - even if it was 40 years ago. It's so encouraging to see a fellow kilt-wearer who eschews the ubiquitous ecru hose and who favours scarlet garter flashes with evening dress - and a kilt in what appears to be modern Lamont - a superb choice.

As for the travelling Prince Charlie brigade, I can see we have our work cut out for us on the educational front. It's reassuring to know that in your part of the world Highland dress is worn properly - that's something worth aspiring to.

[Blaidd]

I believe hard tartan is a fabric which has not completed the finishing process. Ie- not stretched, scoured, nor treated; essentially as it came off the loom.
Saxony- just a guess- would be fully processed fabric, probably using synthetic dyes. It mentions a direct comparison to natural dyes and the hard tartans.

From my recent Highlands visit, I understood 'hard' tartan to be the 'now lost' technique of weaving, which made the cloth almost waterproof? I stand to be corrected/educated of course.

[Highland Logan]

Yes indeed the Prince Charlie went from being a novel jacket thought of as being mostly suitable to fashionable young men in the 1920s to becoming near-universal by the 1960s.

I would imagine that all the fashionable young men in the 1920s, following the marketing of the day, became the older gentlemen in PCs that the next generation followed as examples leading us to where we are today. As the wearing of the dress became less and less common, it became too easy to turn it into a "uniform", and for the hire shops to carry less of a variety of jackets.

I may just be stating the obvious, but its not been implicitly said as of yet.

Frank