A new House of Edgar collection

[Mike Horah]

I like them personally and they help to keep my socks up! While I have flashes to match the three different tartans I wear I also have others - red- black and a check light grey - which can vary the mix and can just as easily be used to match the socks for example. On a black tie evening I may well wear black flashes with black socks .

And( horror of horrors) I have a bespoke leather kilt I had made in imitation of Black Watch in blue and green leather for the pleats and it has blue and green leather flashes. The rules for matching stuff are like any other formal or otherwise clothing ensemble - If you care in any way about it of course - you mix and match to suit your personality the occasion , (the weather!)your own colouring etc And just for a bit of variety. I don't suppose back in the day Highlanders paid too much attention to this . No Scots kilt wearing friends I know seem overly fussed either.

And if you really want to be antique you don't use elastic anyway let alone flashes but cloth ties made of the tartan. There seems to be quite a fashion these days for Jacobite style wear which personally I find quite appealing, but I think belted plaid is not for me!

[geomick]

I like them personally and they help to keep my socks up! While I have flashes to match the three different tartans I wear I also have others - red- black and a check light grey - which can vary the mix and can just as easily be used to match the socks for example. On a black tie evening I may well wear black flashes with black socks .

And( horror of horrors) I have a bespoke leather kilt I had made in imitation of Black Watch in blue and green leather for the pleats and it has blue and green leather flashes. The rules for matching stuff are like any other formal or otherwise clothing ensemble - If you care in any way about it of course - you mix and match to suit your personality the occasion , (the weather!)your own colouring etc And just for a bit of variety. I don't suppose back in the day Highlanders paid too much attention to this . No Scots kilt wearing friends I know seem overly fussed either.

And if you really want to be antique you don't use elastic anyway let alone flashes but cloth ties made of the tartan. There seems to be quite a fashion these days for Jacobite style wear which personally I find quite appealing, but I think belted plaid is not for me!

I do need to get a couple of pairs of classic striped garters to go along with 17th/18thC hose (once I get some of those).

[figheadair]

And if you really want to be antique you don't use elastic anyway let alone flashes but cloth ties made of the tartan. There seems to be quite a fashion these days for Jacobite style wear which personally I find quite appealing, but I think belted plaid is not for me!

Traditional garters were striped, not tartan. Here's a are a couple of 18th century pairs.

[Mike Horah]

Traditional garters were striped, not tartan. Here's a are a couple of 18th century pairs.

Good point sloppy wording on my part re-enactors gartaes are not tartan as you say

[OC Richard]

A quirky thing about the kit of the Scottish regiments is that while on the one hand they occasionally introduce new non-traditional (and sometimes downright hideous) things, while on the other hand they're a bastion of older traditions, things that predate our modern "traditional" Highland Dress (which emerged following World War One).

Striped flashes is one of those things, they survive in the pipers' kit in 4SCOTS (green) and Scots Guards (red).



The pipers of 4SCOTS



Pipe Major Scots Guards



About flashes colours and the wearing/not wearing of them, once again I find it helpful to turn to The Highlanders of Scotland, by far the largest corpus of mid-19th century colour portraits of men in Highland Dress.

While these portraits don't tell us much about modern "traditional Highland Dress" due to Highland Dress undergoing a major overhaul after they were painted, they do give us an in-colour overview of what was worn in the 1860s. (For B&W images showing all of the same things we have thousands of Victorian photos to look at.)

Interestingly wearing visible flashes wasn't all that popular. In The Highlanders of Scotland only 16 of the 56 kilted men have flashes showing. Just why wearing visible flashes became routine by the 1920s who can say.

Except for three striped flashes, all are plain red. Interestingly plain red flashes were worn by all the surviving kilted Scottish Highland regiments (excepting some pipers as mentioned above).

Two of the plain red flashes do have contrasting edging, one black, one white.

Four men in "day" tweed in The Highlanders of Scotland, no visible flashes, no kilt pins, no sginean, three of the four wearing ordinary brogues.