Figure 1.--It was quite common by the 1890s for parents to dress whole families, including brothers and sisters in sailor outfits. Image courtesy of the MD collection.
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Figure 1.--It was quite common by the 1890s for parents to dress whole families, including brothers and sisters in sailor outfits. Image courtesy of the MD collection. |
It was Queen Victoria's sons who first wore sailor suits. The style was initially one for boys. Queen Victoria did not dress her daughters in sailor suits. We are not sure when the sailor suit first became a popular style for girls as well. We known that the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra dressed the three princesses in dresses with sailor styling during the 1870s. They may well have been some of the first girls to wear dresses with sailor styling. We begin to see girls more commonly wearing sailor dresses in the 1880s, including dresses with traditional sailor styling--not just elements of sailor styling in their dresses. By the 1890s we see whole families wearing sailor outfits, sometimes coordinated outfits. Many brothers and sisters wore identical middy blouses with the boys wearing pants and the girls skirts. Sometimes the headwear was also identical.
The Brirish royal family was especially known for wearing sailor suits. Here we see all the children of Edward VII and Alexandra dressed in sailor suits for a 1879 portrait. The boys wear sailor suits and the girls sailor dresses.
The sailor suit was a popular style that could be used to dress all the children in matching outfits. Here we see a cabinet card portrait of four boys, almost certainly brothers. They are all dressed in matching sailor suits, posing on what looks to be a mockup of the deck of a ship. They are standard solid color suits, presumably blue. They have white collars and dickies. They were apparently worn with boater hats. The suits have bell-bottom pants. Each boy has a lanyard and whistle. The boys look to be about 5-10 years old. The portrait was taken by G. Brown and Son studio in Deal and Ramsgate, England. There is writing on the back which I can't make out, but it is signed "G. Brown". Could this possibly be Brown's son? It is most unusual for a photographer to sign one of his cabinent cards.
It was quite common by the 1890s for parents to dress whole families, including brothers and sisters in sailor outfits. Here the boy wears a middy blouse with kneepants and the girl a sailor-styled dress (figure 1). The styling of the sailor collar is similar. The boy looks to have a red collar and the girl a blue collar. We are not sure where this portrait was made, but Dover seems likely. Studios in resort towns commonly offered portraits like this to tourists taking a family seaside vacation.
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