Belgian Boys Garments: Berets


Figure 1.--This Belgian boy wears a beret with a snazy stripped blazer. He wears his blazer with a sporty open collared shirt. Note how he is wearing his beret. The portrait is undated, but it looks like the 1920s to us.

The headwear most associated with Belgian boys is probably the beret also worn by French boys. I'm not sure when Belgian boys first began wearing berets. The chronology is probably similar to trends in France. I think it was more commonly worn by French than Dutch speaking Belgian boys. After World War II, however, the beret was no longer commonly worn by Belgian boys. In America the beret is more associated with girls than boys. This was not the case in Belgium, France, and Spain where the beret was worn by men and boys and not girls. The beret was primarily a boys' garment. We are unsure to what extent girls may have worn them. The image here suggests that boys pulled their berets over their ears in the winter. The boy on the previous page wears a green beret in this post card which has had color painted in. We think that black berets were the most common type. A French reader tells us that, "in Belgium like France, the normal color for a beret is dark blue or black." HBC has noted young boys wearing white or off-white berets, but this may have been an American and not a Belgian fashion. Our French reader continues, "Only in army did one find other colors for berets. The beret was often worn pulled down, even covering the ears in cold weather. Only in the army was it worn at an angle." HBC notes that after World War II, Scouts who adopted bererts, also began wearing them at a jaunty military angle. Berts were worn in many different ways. They could be pulled down here like this boy (figure 1). They could also be worn at a jaunty angle. I'm not sure at this time just what comventions were involved here.








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Created: October 31, 2002
Last updated: October 31, 2002