District Tartans?

[Bugbear]

I have to admit that, like Jock, District tartans were complete strangers to me before I joined here. The first non-clan tartan I ever came across was when a work colleague who was in the Tartan Army bought himself an ex-hire "Flower of Scotland" kilt. His choice was dictated by what the shop had that would fit him and he never considered his clan for a moment.
It is nice that there are tartans available nowadays to fit every eventuality but, as Jock says, they are a total irrelevance to us Scots people - yet another fact like Borders families never having been clans and Irish people never having worn kilts that seems to cause immense difficulty here and raise recriminations against the person who has the gall to even hint at it.

I tried to bring this up in another thread, but I think it didn't quite come across too well, or even may have made someone angry. Over here, in the US, a lot of us aren't raised with that same sense of clan. We do, however, end up being raised with a strong sense of our region or state and even city. Sometimes it's a group or even sports team. The concept probably doesn't translate very well, but this focus on distric tartans might be in part just from trying to understand the concept of a clan tartan as a non-Scot.

I have no desire to throw any of that in the face of the Scottish people, or to tell the Scots how to wear their own national dress. I also don't know what to do about any of this if someone has a kilt in a distric tartan hanging in the closet, or a kilt in any other non-clan tartan, like the one hanging in my closet. Sometimes it feels like the rubberband is being stretched too far to try to find a connection to something from "way back when."

I don't think we can include any of the non-traditional types of kilts in this, so they don't count.

[Phil]

I have no desire to throw any of that in the face of the Scottish people, or to tell the Scots how to wear their own national dress.[/i]

Well said, and I, similarly, would never presume to tell anyone what they should or should not wear. That is entirely a matter for themselves and not one they should ever have to justify to anyone else. I am sure that few, if any clan members would object to someone wearing their clan's tartan. For myself I am less comfortable with tartan being used in other ways than highland dress but that, again, is only my view.