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It’s tartan, not plaid, to the clannish Scots 10-27-2008
Arkansas Democrat Gazette
By Celia Storey
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Ordinary active wear is the dress of the day for beginners ’ classes given by the Arkansas Scottish Country Dance Society, but for grand occasions they bring out their plaid.
They’ll correct you if you call it plaid. The term is tartan. There are hundreds of tartans. They come in patterns and hues traditionally associated with particular clans for reasons that, historically, had something in common with the colors chosen by drug gangs today.
Once upon a time if a man wore the wrong one into a pub, he was asking to be pummeled by that family’s foes. Not so much anymore, but around the world opinions differ mildly on whether it’s OK for a modern Scottish country dancer to don colors he’s not kin to. Arkansas dancers don’t much mind. At the Oct. 20 class session, Dave Rieger showed off his legs in a kilt he’s not related to. From the toes up he wore ghillies (black ballet-type slippers with string ties ); white knee socks decorated by “flashes,” which are elastic garters to hold up the socks, artfully hidden by the cuff of the socks; and a chipped 4-inch knife called a sgian dubh (“ skeedoo” ) tucked behind one sock “for snipping threads and such.” His kilt bore the tartan pattern Weathered Grahams of Menteith. He’s not a member of that clan (“ I’m German, ” he said ), but it’s a pattern pretty much anyone can adopt without coming to blows with some ancient enemy.
The kilt — don’t call it a wrap-skirt, even though that’s what it is — bore a metal pin near the hem. “It’s to weigh your kilt down so it doesn’t fly up in the breeze and show off... what’s underneath,” Bernadette Rieger said. Does a man in a kilt — for instance, Dave — have underwear on?
“That depends if you’re regimental or not,” he said.
“If they’re regimental then they don’t wear underwear,” his wife said.
“No,” Dave countered. “The deal is if you’re regimental, you wear what they issued you in the military, which doesn’t include scanties. A lot of guys do that because it’s very comfortable.” “For social things, yes, you’d wear underwear,” Bernadette said, meaning “tonight you had better be wearing undies, my dear.” “Yes, I wear underwear because... you know,” Dave said.
Above his, ahem, loins hung the popular black leather man-purse called a sporran. “I have my wallet and car keys in here,” Dave said, tugging the chain and leather belt that kept the sporran at his waist. From the waist on up his effect was somewhat dampened by a gray short-sleeve T-shirt. “But if you want to go formal you would have a white tuxedo shirt, tie or bowtie, and I have a tuxedo jacket that’s real short,” he said. “Queen Victoria said the women should wear white dresses so as not to compete with the men in their kilts,” Bernadette said. But that practice is less common in Arkansas than long skirts patterned after a family tartan.
Judy Robertson’s kneelength skirt was the dressy “Red Robertson” tartan — so named, she explained, not for some ancestor named Red but for the color. The Robertson clan also has a green pattern: Hunting Robertson. “Oh well, you know they’re a fancy clan,” said Edith Miller, teasing. She was born and reared in Scotland, a member of the MacLellen family, and she showed off a sash made in her family’s tartan. “We just have the one,” Miller said. “We were thrifty.”
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