Coat with Kilt

[OC Richard]

I see you're in Georgia. Highland Games (the place where many of us are kilted) are usually held during summer and in much of the USA it's just too hot for jackets.

So we end up in shirtsleeves, or wearing vests/waistcoats.

A waistcoat gives a nice dressy look without being too hot, and many of the ordinary mens vests you can buy at a mall or online work fine with kilts. Some ordinary vests are too long, you're best to try on some vests with your kilts, measure the length that you need, and when you go shopping take a tape measure just to be sure.

Here's myself and a couple fellow XMarkers at a California Highland Games. I don't think any of the vests were made expressly for kilts. The centre one is an Eddie Bauer and I think one on the right is an Orvis.



Western Wear vests make good kilt-wear waistcoats, especially the tweed ones with four pockets and notched lapels.



About jackets yes there's a considerable difference in length between a non-Highland ("Saxon") jacket and a Highland kilt jacket.

Basically Saxon jackets are a couple inches longer than the sleeves, kilt jackets are a couple inches shorter than the sleeves.

Even when a kilt jacket is somewhat long in the body, coming to the cuffs, the lower front edges strongly curve away so that the sporran isn't hidden



You can take an ordinary suit jacket or sportcoat to a tailor or anyone handy at sewing and they can shorten it, but due to the way the 2nd buttonhole is placed, and the way the pockets are placed, a shortened Saxon jacket looks like what it is, a conversion.

Now, in Victorian times it was quite common for a man to wear the same tweed jacket for trousers and kilt.

However the jackets were cut differently then, designed to button using one of the higher buttons on the chest, and the whole front of the jacket swinging open in an inverted "V" creating room for the sporran to be seen.

Modern suit coats/sportcoats are cut to hang straight down in front, which covers the sporran.



Here you can see that any of the jackets being worn by the men in trousers would work just as well with kilts, swinging open in front where the sporrans would be. Give that piper a drink!

[kiltedsawyer]

I see you're in Georgia. Highland Games (the place where many of us are kilted) are usually held during summer and in much of the USA it's just too hot for jackets.

Actually Richard, the Highland Games in Georgia with the largest attendance are the third weekend in October, (every year except this year for obvious reasons,) and jackets are often worn. This is of course the Stone Mountain Highland Games. If you are in the area in 2021 around that time, please stop by and share a wee dram!
Cheers,

David

[OC Richard]

Ah yes I've been to Stone Mountain! It's great. Our pipe band made the trip to compete, I think it was 1996 or 1997.

Yes it was very pleasant weather.

The traditional holding of Highland Games during the summer makes sense for Scotland but not so much for the USA.

Here in California our summers were for many years bookended by our two biggest Games, the competition season kicking off on Memorial Day Weekend with Greater Los Angeles' biggest Games and ending on Labor Day Weekend with the San Francisco Bay Area's biggest Games.

Then smaller Games started cropping up both before and after those big ones, so now our competition season begins in February and ends in October.

I will say that for somebody living in California I've done a fair share of eastern Games: Wellington OH, Grandfather Mountain (three times), Stone Mountain, Loch Norman, Bridgeport WV (four times), Alexandria VA, Fair Hill MD. (The key part is being within driving distance of my Mom's place in West Virginia.)