Figure 1.-- This is a school room in Dresden, Germany, photographed in 1911. Notice how many of the boys are wearing sailor suits with scarves. Most of the boys are wearing white shirts with open collars and knee pants held up by suspenders. A few of the boys wear knee socks, but most seem to be wearing black long stockings. These boys seem to be. 12-13 years old. We assume it was the early grade in a secondary school, most were single-gender schools. The teacher stands at the rear of the room for the photograph. Normally he would be seated at a desk in the front of the room. Notice that while the voys wearing shirts have suspenders, byr the boys wearing sailor blouses do not, at least tghey wee not worn over their sailor blouses.

We are not sure just how sailor suit trousers were suspended. There was the button-on option. And we note some button-on pants for younger boys. School-age boys, however, for the most part did not wearbutton-on styles. It is less clear how the pants worn with the middy blouses that had waist ties were suspended. The belt was not commonly worn to suspend trouswers in the 19th or early 20th centuries. The principal method of trouswer suspension was suspenders. That can be seen very clearly in the photographic record. It is desguised somewhat if boys are wearing suit jackets. But the boys wearing only shirts or blouses very clearly show how common suspenders were. Belts began to appear in the inter-War era, especially the 1930s, but before that suspanders were commom. But suspenders were not worn over sailor blouses so we are not sure how the sailor trousers were suspended. A reader writes, "I think German boys must have worn suspenders under their middy blouses when they were too old for button on garments. I'm not quite sure, but I don't think most pants were not commonly nmade with belt loops until the 1920s or 30s. One analagous point that could throw light on the issue. Adult men who wore tunics as part of their military uniforms almost always wore suspenders to hold up their trousers, but of course these didn't show when the tunic was in place. This is still the means of trouser suspport, for instance, with West Point cadets. So I think suspenders under the sailor blouses are very probable. But I'm not sure I've ever seen a boy with only the sailor knee pants and without the blouse. They would not of course be the normal way boys were photographed." A factor of course is that shirts were tucked into the pants and thus the suspenders could be attached to the waisline of the psnts only if the suspdbnders were worn over the shirt. Sailor blouses on the other hand extended over the waistline. This there was no ways to sttach suspenders worn over the blouse.

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Created: 8:03 PM 11/23/2010
Last updated: 8:03 PM 11/23/2010