A Silly Question About Wearing The Kilt

I would do for it. I wore a hat to a wedding not very much done here and i got some questions and i just shurgged it off but i was the only english person at the wedding to lol

Yeah, that's true - wearing a hat to a wedding is apparently a very british thing to do! There's nothing wrong with wearing a cake on your head to a wedding I think..

Yeah just go with the kilt and then just if they ask tell them why

Since you're talking about wearing a kilt to a party in the EU I'm sure that it isn't going to be a great novelty. Most people in the EU are as aware of Scottish traditional dress as we former "colonials" of the UK. It might make you stand out like a sore thumb in many nations like perhaps China or Saudi Arabia, but certainly not in Belgium.

Just out of curiosity do you plan to wear full traditional  formal atire including Black Barathea jacket or simply the kilt, sporran, dress shirt and tie? Will you wear dress or hunting tartan to the event?

I think you'll make an absolute smash hit at the event!!! Certainly people will see you're proud of your heritage.

Cheers,
William James Woodward - Brazil & Canada Expert, Expat-blog Team

Well, I did go with the kilt in the end!.. And it pretty much went as expected because I spent most of the night answering the same questions again and again (questions about family tartan / what's under my kilt / what's a sporan for etc etc).

I'm afraid to say my immediate collegues (from Belgium/Germany/Poland/France) all found it really bizarre and they more-or-less stood in a circle around me, either staring at the kilt, or firing questions at me.

Yeah I was wearing my prince charlie jacket, wastecoat, .. the whole lot. And from your question above: my kilt is just the 'modern' version, I think my brother has the old hunting one as I remember which I actually prefer because the colors are nice and faded. It's really nice to wear it again and nice to stand out a bit, but it's not so nice when people treat it as some kind of bizarre self-dericating joke as seemed to be case, with questions like "is it cold wearing a skirt like that?" etc.

I tried explaining that it's normal to wear the kilt to lots of occasions (anything from birthdays to weddings to the opening of an envelope) but I'm not sure they believed me. Eventually I started asking my (cheeky) colleagues if they themselves were not wearing underwear either, or if their neck ties were their family ties or cufflinks symbolic of their Belgian heritage  .. (apparently not).

As of last year, we now also have colleagues from South Africa, Mauritius, Jamaica and parts of South America too, who were also there. And luckily I was able to have a normal conversation with the South Africans at my table.