Figure 1.--This portrait of Johanna and Wilhelm Fischer was painted by Ludwig Aumont in 1838. We do not know which child is Ludwig. We initially thought it was the younger child, but not belive it is the older child on the left. Image used courtesy of La Couturière Parisienne. It shows some effort by the parents to coordinate the outfits of this brother and sister pair.

HBC has not yet been able to draw chronological trends in the fashion of dressing brothers and sisters in identical or coordinated outfits. To some extent this was affected by breeching. Thus it was relatively easy to dress brothers and sisters in coordinated or even identical outfits if the boy had not yet been breeched. Even so we have relatively few examples of this in ppaintings and photographs. After breeching, boys and girls clothing was so different that there it appears to have been realtively little effort to dress boys and girls in coordinated outfits. This is our initial assessment of 19th century trends and would welcome reader insights. This pattern changed after the turn of the century for two reasons. First, Boys less commonly wiore dresses when small and some of the outfits they did wear like tunics and rompers were ameanable to wear by both genders. Second, as the century progressed, girls began to wear a variety of previously boysish styles or garments, again provide more opportunity for coordinating brother and sister outfits. We are not sure to what extent the popularity of coordinating the outfits of boys and girls was in the 20th century. We seem to find more examples of such outfits in the 1950s-70s, bu again that is just a preliminary assessment and much more work is required. These chronological patterns appear to have differed somewhat as to country as the fashion was more popular in specific countries and at different times.

Created: April 8, 2002
Last updated: April 8, 2002