Fly Plaid at Burns Supper?

[OC Richard]

I am afraid that you need to curb your obvious enthusiasm for all things Scottish in general and increase your rather sparse but starry-eyed knowledge of tartan and kilt attire in particular and listen, read and digest, before you leap to conclusions! Yes, we all had to learn even in Scotland and really understand that these finer points of knowledge of Scotland, such as, the Scots past and present, tartans and Scottish history. They are not something that can, always, be learned from a book, or a few weeks holiday here. After a fairly long life spent mostly in Scotland, I am still learning!

Hear, hear!

I'm so indebted to Jock Scot's tireless, kind, but firm guidance over the years. Americans like myself coming to this topic don't know what they don't know (until someone tells them).

The hardest part of that learning curve is divorcing the tourist nonsense...from fact.

Which nonsense has experienced a massive recent infusion (the last thing it needed) from Outlander.

One theme of this thread has been a puzzling thing I've often mentioned: in the mind of the American public Highland Dress floats in a bubble outside the passage of time.

This leads Americans who would never think of wearing an item or two of 18th century clothing when dressed for their day-to-day activities to do so when they don Highland Dress.

Would they show up for a wedding in an ordinary modern suit but wearing a Tricorn hat?

But with Highland Dress time itself evidently doesn't exist, and they'll walk around wearing various bits of historical 18th century and Victorian clothing with their otherwise modern Scottish outfit.

The flip side of wearing historical items at ordinary modern functions wearing modern items at historical functions, and I see that too.

I see men attending themed "Dickens Balls" or "Victorian Balls", where everyone not in Highland Dress is wearing period costume, wearing 20th century Highland outfits, especially Prince Charlies (which didn't appear until the Edwardian period), the sorts of sporrans that didn't appear until after WWI, and the white hose + Viking-laced Ghillies, or "semi dress" sporrans, both Kilt Hire c1980 things. (Even the gent wearing the red military doublet seen below is anachronistic for a Dickens event; that style of doublet and sporran didn't exist until around 1870.)