Figure 1.--This German boy with bangs in the 1920s wears a sailor blue sailor suit with contrasting long white stckings for his first day at school. Also note the goodie cone and book and lunch satchel. The boy's bangs ad sailor suit, and perhaps his white stickings as well, suggest to us that this boy came from a prosperous middle-class family.

I do not believe that white stockings were commonly worn by German boys. but have little information at this time. We see German boys commonly wearing long stockings, but not white long stockings. German girls did commonly wear white long stockings, but the boys much less so. We do see some younger boys wearing white stockings. We see relatively few such images. Most seem to have been boys dressed up for formal occassions, but we have seen some boys even wearing them to school. The example here shows a boy wearing a sailor suit for school with long white stockings (figure 1). We have, however, found some. Most of them seem to be in the inter-war era (1920s and 30s). One example is two German brothers, the sons of a pastor, in the 1920s. We note a younger brother in 1925. We note a brother and sister in identical sailor suits with long white stockings about 1930. We also note a German boy in a sailor suit (coordinated with his sisters's) wearing long white stockings in the early 1930s. We see two brothers wearing white stockings with strap shoes in 1933. A reader writes, "Interesting information about the color of Dutch long stockings. It confirms what I have been led to believe about Germany as well. We have somewhere a statement from one of our German readers saying that white long stockings for boys in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s had pretty clear upper-class significance which the middle-class often followed." The same conventions were associated with white knee socks.

Created: 11:49 PM 1/24/2007
Last updated: 9:13 PM 7/9/2011