Practical Menswear Style Journey *

Wherein we buy some kilts from AMZN e'en though we basically KNOW BETTER.....

When you are pretty sure THERE'S NO WAY they are 100% 16 oz wool as advertised, but you are still curious what they might be and the one pretty much only cost ten bucks? [More like twenty?]

I was going to get a different tartan than Black Watch maybe, but I didn't necessarily want to spend more money on a nicer quality kilt for a LESS complicated tartan pattern than this generic one, and then some people would complain if I wore another tartan with BW accessories even though A LOT of people who don't know anything about kilts think that BW is the ONLY tartan that exists or something...

I don't know if I mentioned that I can't decide if I should return the BW one right off or just keep it in case I lose weight by next spring or meet somebody who needs a cheap kilt and can't wait 3 days or whatever for it to arrive if they order one, but that kilt fabric seems the thinnest and most flimsy but also most refined of the bunch.

BUT the "Fraser" tartan here is NOT the same as the official MacKenzie one that has black border elements around the blocks and stripes like the nearly invisible ones in the BW. What threw me off after I already looked them up is that usually the green element in a tartan is turned brown in a weathered version. Since the base color of Fraser Hunting is already brown, here they didn't need to turn a green to get brown, they just tweaked the shade of brown to the usual weathered green "brown" and then the bands of green that are in the tartan bordering the bands of blue, that would have become a darker or different shade of brown, they just eliminated entirely. Really, then, the green should be THIS brown and the brown should be more of a typical tweed fabric crottle* yellow color to look properly aged and less dark.

*[a common lichen found on rocks, used in Scotland to make a golden-brown or reddish-brown dye for staining wool for making tweed.]

So the bands of grey are still the bands of blue tweaked, but we do get a simpler tartan design overall, as I said, because there are less bands of different colors because we've gone from three to two. [Not counting the accent stripes.]

There's four or five Fraser tartans and then variants of each of those, so I don't know if this is my favorite, or how long the "weathered" fad will last, but it was basically an OK choice when they seem to offer few tartan selections overall compared to other companies, etc.