I want to point out that the piper in the photo is wearing Argyle socks with a rather small turn over, so naturally more of his flashes will show. It actually looks like his hose may have shrunk a bit, or been made for a man with shorter legs. If you look just beneath the turn down of the hose, you will see a section of marled blue before the argyle pattern begins in the sock. This should not be there. Ordinarily, the tops of the hose would fold down enough so that the argyle pattern of the cuff lines up with the argyle pattern on the sock. This would mean that the hose we see here were in fact made with a larger cuff and so ordinarily not quite as much of the flashes would be showing.

You can see in the below picture how Argyle hose are normally worn -- no gap between the pattern of the cuff and the pattern of the sock leg.