Figure 1.--These two children wear identical plaid dress, but their collars are different.

Some mothers dresses their children alike, but there were minor differences in the outfit. The differences might be with the bow or collar worn with a dress or suit. It is not always apparent if these differences werevmade to designate age or gender differences or perhaps just carelessness in matching the outfits or finding, for example, identical collars in the same size. I have collected some images which I will attempt to evaluate to try to determine some of the conventions for dressing children.

Figure 1

The two children in figure 1 wear the same plaid dress. Note there are no front buttons as is often the case for boys' dresses. While their dresses are identical the child on the left, clearly a boy, wears a differently shaped collar than the very young child on the right. The boy on the left also appears to have an untied bow--unusual in a formal portrait. Despite the age differencem their mother has decided to dress them in the same dress. The question is, what does the difference in the collars and the bow mean mean. It strikes me that this mother has taken so much care to buy or make identical dresses that the collar difference is probably not an accident. I know of no convention by which boys in dresses would have different collars. Thus it is likely that the younger child is the boys' sister. Note that the two collars are shaped differently. One tendency current at the time was to used rounded collars on girls' dresses. While not always used for girls, the rounded collar to seem to be more commonly used for girls. Also note that the younger chil's collar go fully around the front while the boy's collar appears to have a front cut.

Created: October 26, 1999
Last updated: October 26, 1999