Figure 1.--This American boy with his sister wears a double-breasted knee pants suit. He looks to be about 10-11 years old. The portrait was in a fancy pper frame. We would guess it was taken about 1900.

Boys in the late 17th and early 19th century began wearing the first specialized children clothes. Sailor suits were worn by some boys with the same bell-bottomed pantaloons that real sailors wore, but it was not the widely popular fashion that it was to become after Queen Victoria adopted it for the royal princes. One of the principal fashions for boys of the late 18th and early 19th century was the skeleton suit, worn with long pantaloons or trousers at a time with adult men when they dressed up wore knee breeches. A new style of knee-length pants appeared for boys after mid-century. This new style along with associated more modern styles of knickers and short pants were to dominate boys' fashions for the next hymdred years. They were at first worn by younger boys, but in some periods and countries were worn by older boys, even boys of high school

Knee Pants

Most of the work we have done on knee pants suits has been on the trousers themselves rather than the suits. This is because when knee pants were first introduced they were normally worn as part of a suit. Suits were very common in the 19th century. Thus mot knee pants were really suit pants and two destincr sections, one for the suits and two for the pants did not seem necessary. We habe notice as HBC developed boys in the 1890s wearing knee pants with blouses and without a suit jacket. This seems to have been particularly common in the 1890s. So we decided that in addition to te knee pants page that a knee pants suit was needed. Until we have time to woek on the suit page, most of the information on knee pants will be in the trouser section.