Two Plaids?

[YoungMan]

In one minor defense of ye olde wikipedia, you can often follow the footnotes provided in the article to the source material. I've often been surprised to find how valid some of the sources are. Granted some articles are bunk, but I think that a large number of them are better researched than many are willing to give credit.

Now to swing back to the subject. Entirely my opinion, I would say that my first advice would be to keep it simple by wearing one tartan in one shading. If you are adventurous, and one of those people who just seem to be able to pull things off, then I would try mixing different shading (M,A,W) of the same tartan.

If you really want to wear a combination of tartans, then once again my personal opinion would be, wear your clan tartan as the kilt. Then if you represent a particular sept, district, or county you could wear that as the plaid. However, I would discourage against wearing just any old combination. Personally I feel like it be interesting to have a plaid that further details your connection to the clan kilt at your waist.

My mother's family are border Youngs, a sept of Douglas. Within my little personal theory I might wear a Douglas kilt and a Young plaid.

On my father's side I read an academic paper written by some yank with a lot of freetime that swears up and down that American Shanklands/Shanklins (I'm the latter) can trace their roots all the way back to the MacGregors. So, having no particular tartan for the sept, I might be inclined to wear a MacGregor kilt and then a Lanarkshire or Glasgow plaid to show the location of the families origin prior to pond hopping.

Pardon my wordiness as this has been mostly an exercise in theory and whim. The short of the long is, if you really want to mix it up I'm not going to yell you down for it, but I would advise to do so under at least the pretense of genealogical logic. Mixing Campbell and MacDonald just because you think they look good, or because you can claim both, is certainly ill-advised.

[MacLowlife]

OK, step back and let someone with no knowledge or authority have his say.

I elicited a number of heated replies on a similar topic not long ago- pertaining to the wearing of multiple tartans generally. I will not argue with those who know about clan feuds, hostilities, or incompatibilities, but I am going to have to say that MANY tartans match on a pure aesthetic level. If you look, for instance, at the dress tartans which add white to an otherwise unaltered palette, they surely match the non-dress version. Or look at the tartans which start with Campbell / Black Watch and add a stripe or two: You can't really say that green and blue doesn't match green, blue,and white or green, blue, and yellow. AND, if you are thinking about it, the Royal Stewart and Black Watch tartans might well have complementary color schemes, depending on the muting or fading of the red and the brightness of the blue. It might be a bit much, but it might work very well, indeed. In fact, it might "work" better than the combination of bright "cool" colors of a modern tartan sett and the muted "warm" ones of the same clan's ancient sett- though we have established elsewhere that two tartans from / for the same clan are acceptable to be worn together on a heraldic level. And we have established elsewhere that two dye lots of the same sett can vary tremendously- the sort of variation that housepainters frequently try to pass off as "the angle of the light on that wall".

I started off by saying I do not know anything. I do know that I have read some things in other threads here at XMarks and presume to attribute the opinions expressed to the characters whose names appear below them. If I were to run into Matt Newsome whilst wearing Black Watch and Modern Douglas together, I might ask his opinion in a wry tone of voice, expecting him to be probably diplomatic. If, somehow, I ran into Jock Scot while sporting Royal Stewart and a Farquharson plaid ( any kind of plaid) I'd ask him to join me for a couple of drinks, since it would probably mean we were in the highlands and needed to be attending to important (elbow bending) matters before we started quibbling about articles of clothing. And if I were wearing a tartan doublet and bumped into JSFMacL, I would be much more interested in his opinion of the cut and construction of the doublet than in what he thought of my choice to wear it with a kilt that didn't "match".

Somehow, nobody yet has referred to what we might just as well call the Bay City Rollers Effect, which again, has more to do with a sense of how much is too much than with what offends los tartanistos.

Nobody has yet stomped on the OP's use of PLAID (two plaids) when he meant TARTAN. I will not do so, either- we all know what he meant. He DID ask about socially acceptable and I think this thread has revealed that depends entirely on whose society you are discussing.

Looking forward to seeing all and sundry on S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y ni-ight.

[dfmacliam]

I might want to point out.. the OP mentions his avatar is of his county tartan.. it is an Irish County Fermanagh tartan, and then he mentions the clan tartan from said county.. I would feel that the reasoning some are using, about the different past fueding clans, is not an issue here..

[OC Richard]

a kilt of your clan's dress tartan

Men should not be wearing any dress tartan either in a kilt or in any other form: dress tartans were specifically designed for female clothing.

[OC Richard]

MANY tartans match on a pure aesthetic level.

This is an important point I think.

Old portraits show, more often than not, a mixing of tartans between the kilt and plaid...but the tartans utilise the same colour scheme and blend in seamlessly. Most often all the tartans have a red basis with overstripes of black or extremely dark blue and/or green. I've just glanced though a number of 18th century portraits and all show a mix of tartans, often trews of one tartan and plaid of another.

I have a postcard of the Isle of Skye Pipe Band, the photo perhaps dating to the 1960's, which show two different tartans freely mixed within the band. However the two tartans are nearly identical: one has the "MacDonald motif" in dark green on a red ground, the other is identical but also has a black line centred in the large red area. Both tartans, I think, are derived from an 18th century portrait of the MacDonald children by Jeremiah Davidson in which the two boys, between them, are wearing four different red tartans (not including the red & white diced hose).

To me it would be not only acceptable, but perhaps preferable, to have the plaid and kilt be of different, though blending, tartans.

[macwilkin]

Men should not be wearing any dress tartan either in a kilt or in any other form: dress tartans were specifically designed for female clothing.

<in best RSM voice>"Tin hats on lads!" :mrgreen:

T.

[M. A. C. Newsome]

Men should not be wearing any dress tartan either in a kilt or in any other form: dress tartans were specifically designed for female clothing.

Methinks someone missed the thread on dress tartans!

[ChattanCat]

<rant on>

I for one, don't like rules!

I'm scottish and I WILL do what I WANT!

Nuff said, I will mix tartan if I want, and I have not want.
<\rant off>

I have never mixed tartans and don't plan to.