During the twentieth century coloured stoles in the seasonal liturgical colours became common over the Geneva gown across mainline Protestantism, arriving with the liturgical renewal movement and with a general recovery of the church year in churches that had let it lapse. The change was rarely legislated and rarely debated at the time.
It has been objected to since, and the objection is coherent. The stole is the mark of an ordained minister of the eucharist in the traditions that ordain priests, the gown was adopted precisely to deny that the minister is such a priest, and putting the one over the other reverses part of the original argument in a way that most congregations never notice. The counter-argument, made as often, is that the stole in Protestant use marks ordination and office rather than sacrificing priesthood, and that a symbol may be received without receiving the theology it once carried elsewhere.
The same period saw a partial move in some Lutheran and Reformed congregations back to the alb, generally with a stole, on the ground that a baptismal white garment belongs to the whole church rather than to a priesthood. Between the gown, the alb, the stole and the plain business suit that many congregations now see, Protestant clerical dress is more varied than it has been at any point since the sixteenth century, and each of the options is an argument that somebody made deliberately.