Figure 1.--Here we see 4-year old Willie Higgins from Waupaca, Wisconsin. He wears ribbed long stockings with his knee pants suit. Wisconsin is one of the northern-most U.S. states an experiences very severe winters. The cabinet card portrait here is undated, but we believe was taken in the 1890s.

Many more examples from the 1890s than from the previous decade have been archived on HBC. This of course reflects the iuncreasing popularity of photography and declining proces for portraits. We find numerous examples of both plain and ribbed stockings. White stockings, worn for dressy and formal occasions, were almost always of smooth weave. Note these fashionable boys (Fig. 1) in white knee pants with the stockings to match in the 1890s. Also in the 1890s, Harry Gill, a boy playing a banjo, wears plain black stockings with his dressy knee pants suit During the same decade we find two boys in plain black stockings enjoying photography with their father. A boy, perhaps a German boy, from Alsace-Loraine (sometime during the 1890s) appears to wear the standard plain-weave black stockings with his knee pants. An 1892 photo of British schoolboys in their school uniform shows similar long black stockings of plain weave, worn with knee pants.An elegantly dressed lad, photographed with his family in 1893, again shows black stockings of apparently smooth weave. A unidentified boy from Gardiner, Maine (1894) wears the traditional smoothly textured black long stockings. Plain weave stockings seem to have been standard wear for American schoolboys during the decade. Note the stockings worn in 1895 by the students of the Misses Porter School, in Middleton, New York. Two American boys from Indianapolis in the late 1890s wear dressy plain-weave stockings with their Fauntleroy suits. Canadian boys often wore plain-weave stockings with their knee pants for formal studio portraits. The McMaster boy of Montreal is shown with a white blouse and black long stockings of smooth appearance. Another example is one of the Brown children, photographed in Montreal in 1897 with plain black stockings. Not surprisingly, plain weave stockings were favored by Goddard White in 1897, or more likely his mother. This American violin virtuoso had his portrait take, perhaps just before a recital appearances. Two Canadian boys, again from Montreal (from the Armstrong and Balfour families) wear plain-weave black stockings with their knee pants—again for formal studio portraits in 1898. A boy named Arthur Franz, of German extraction apparently, was photographed in America in 1898 wearing white stockings in the usual plain weave. His European background may explain the color and weave, but white stockings were almost always of smooth texture in both Europe and the United States. A German schoolboy, Emil Brack, is seen in 1899 wearing plain brown long stockings with his knee pants. Finally, we note an American boy at some point in the 1890s wearing heavy woolen stockings, probably gray or brown, with knee pants (Fig. 1). Although heavily textured because of their weight, this hosiery appears to be non-ribbed. Ribbed stockings seem to have been almost as popular as non-ribbed during the decade, being worn both with dressy outfits and for play. In a photo of three boys from Norval, Ontario, taken in the 1890s, we see both ribbed and non-ribbed stockings being worn. The older boy wears plain hosiery whereas his younger brother with a very fancy collar and bow wears heavily ribbed hose. Two different American boys, shown with their tricycles during the decade, both wear ribbed stockings with their sailor suits. These lads look quite dressed up for play activities, but boys dressed more formally in the 1890s even for leisure. In the first example, see Fig. 3; in the second example see Fig. 4. Three boys from Akron, Ohio (during the 1890s) wear ribbed black stockings with supporters and dressy Norfolk style suits with floppy bows.American Fauntleroy suits in the 1890s were sometimes worn with ribbed stockings (see Fig. 2 for a detail showing the ribbing). For another example (also dated to the 1890s) note the very fine-gauge black stockings that are nevertheless ribbed. This photograph illustrates the difficulty of always being sure whether stockings are ribbed or non-ribbed because fine-gauge ribbing is meant, of course, to give the appearance of greater neatness and close fit. One of the two Syder brothers (1890s), the one with knee pants, wears ribbed black stockings with a knee pants suit with large collar and floppy bow. The advertisements of the period sometimes show boys wearing ribbed or highly textured stockings. A Work Brothers ad (1893) clearly shows the ribbed stockings being worn with a knee pants suits (Fig. 1). A another advertisement (a drawing) of the same year shows an illustrated boy wearing a Fauntleroy blouse with knee pants and apparently heavily textured stockings although it is difficult to be certain how accurately the stockings are represented. The stockings here (Fig. 3) do not appear to be ribbed, however. A photo of Robert Mason Hamilton (1897) shows the American boy wearing heavy ribbed woolen stockings with a very dressy knee pants suit. Woolen stockings seem often to have been manufactured in prominently ribbed texture so as to be less baggy. Even so, these stockings seem to fit somewhat loosely, possibly because Robert may be wearing long underwear underneath. Finally, HBC has at least four examples of Canadian boys, all of them from Montreal, wearing black ribbed long stockings with formal outfits. The Rankin boy wears a sailor suit with an unusually large and prominent starched collar (1898). Notice the ribbed black stockings and the dressy shoes. The much older Beckett boy (1899) wears ribbed stockings with a Norfolk-style knee pants suits. He seems to be at least 15 or 16.and may be even older. In 1899, one of the Russell children wears a white sailor suit with dickey and black ribbed stockings. Also in 1899, we see the Ross brothers, the younger of whom wears a very formal knee pants suits with extremely wide-ribbed but nevertheless quite dressy black stockings that he holds up, not with the more usual hose supporters, but with round black garters, one of which shows at the hem of his trousers.