The Pros and Cons of Plaid

By William Sushon | Friday, April 21, 2006

Originally Published October 31, 1990.

Plaid is beautiful.

That’s right, plaid. That great pattern that has graced the backs of blue-blooded twits for centuries. Not glen plaid or tattersall plaid either. We’re talking about real plaid here. Glenn plaid is really only overblown houndsooth and tattersall is just criss-crossed lines.

Tartan plaid is the only plaid to speak of.

These plaids, of course, have their origin in ancient Scotland, from those same great people who used to paint themselves blue and run around sporting loin-clothes and menacing people with large axes. They are also, incidentally, the same Celtic tribes that gave us golf. Interestingly, golf and plaid have been intertwined throughout history. In order to impress one’s friends, the twit just must have those oh-so-cute club head covers with the St. Andrews tartan and pom-poms on them.

The Scotsmen, when they stopped painting themselves blue, also graduated from loin-clothes to skirts. That’s right, those same fellows who ran around wielding four-foot-long swords wore skirts. Well, not skirts actually.

They wore kilts.

The only real reason for them to do so, of course, was the fact that they needed to identify themselves with their own respective clans. One really can’t tell the difference between two Scotsmen, even if they are from different clans. They’re both pretty tall, with long red hair and beards. So they devised these nifty patterns that they could wear on their kilts and use to set themselves apart.

Those barbarians are far from the egotistical twits who sport plaid clothing today. Even since Ralph Lauren got it in his mind that he should extend some modicum of the privileges of the monied elite to the middle classes, everyone thinks that he is a plaid aficionado. The problem is that many of these people just can’t wear plaid properly.

Look at Rodney Dangerfield. He doesn’t know how to wear plaid.

The Duke of Windsor did.

Many people think of a lumberjack every time they see someone sporting a plaid flannel shirt. They just don’t quite understand what it really is to wear plaid. Plaid makes a nice pattern for tweeds, as well as gracing a nice flannel shirt or two. The difference between the Canadian fellow with the unkempt beard and the snotty fellow driving the vintage Jaguar motorcars is that the lumberjack is wearing loud plaid. Red, usually. And very, very bright. The fellow with the XK150 drophead coupe is probably wearing a very muted, dark plaid, almost always incorporating a lot of green (green is by far the twittiest color one could think of). Moreover, he’s probably wearing his plaid with a pair of khakis that have been in the family since granddaddy went away to Salisbury, whereas the lumberjack would most likely wear a lovely pair of Levi’s overalls and a red hat with earflaps.

Why, then, this fascination with a mode of dress shared by the proletariat.

Well, you see, the twit feels that he must show some guts, some chutzpah. Usually he does so by participating in some extremely brave and nasty pursuits like hunting. When one hunts, he can be wantonly destructive and feel as though he’s very, very powerful. It appeals to that inner instinct which tells the twit he should be out there providing for his family.

Plaid is part of that phenomenon.

In wearing plaid, the twit can establish a gruff, rugged, sort of façade with which to face the world. It’s as if to say (with clenched teeth of course), “I’m tough, I wear plaid. Everyone look at me.” Then he can go on to discuss how he likes to go for top-down rides in the rain when it’s about forty degrees, and how annoying it really was when his SU carburetors fell out of synchronization and the XK had to be in the shop for at least a week.

Wow, he’s really tough.

You see, the twit thinks that he gets at least twice as much hair on his chest and adds a foot to his shoulder measurement. He can still feel masculine while he’s sitting there sipping tea, pinky rigid in the air, of course.

He’s right.

Plaid just has the power to transform even the wimpiest little fellow into a roaring lion. There is a mystique to plaid that lends any man an air of ruggedness and strength.

That’s the magic of plaid.

So far, only the male of the twit species has gone under the microscope of plaid. But the female twit loves plaid at least as much as the male. In fact, women can wear more plaid than men, and love it. Rather than make women more masculine, plaid leds them some sort of feminine charm that can only achieve by wearing that L.L. Bean Dress Campbell plaid shirt that mummy gave her when she left for Mt. Holyoke College. Women’s delicate nature and charm are accentuated by the roughness of the flannel fabric, transforming them into goddesses of twithood.

This article, by its title, promised to look at the pros and cons of plaid. It doesn’t seem that any cons have been mentioned as yet, and you, gentle reader, have reached nearly the bottom of the page. There’s a good reason for that.

There are no cons to plaid.

The Pros and Cons of Plaid

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