Figure 1.--This CDV portrait was taken by E. Willis of Milford, Massachusetts. The boy wears a collar-buttoning suit jacket. He wears a narrow ribbon bow. The portrait was taken in 1883. |
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We do not yet have a detailed chronology of narrow ribbon ties. As far as we can tell, these ribbon bows appeared in the 1860s. We have not yet found examples from the 1850s. This style of bow was common in the 1860s. We note a numbrr of examples. Our archive is still very limited. We notice these bows into the early 1880s. The slender ribbon bow as a child's style declined in the 1880s as mothers opted for increasingly large bows. We see many more floppy bows in the 1880s, especially in the second half of the decade. Here the Little Lord Fauntleroy craze was a major factor. With the explosion in collsar styles, many American mothers apparently decided that narrow ribbon bows did not look right. We do, however, occassionally see them even later. HBC has found it difficult to fully assess this style. Unfortunately many available images are undated making it difficult to assess the time line.
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