Figure 1.--Here Pünktchen is getting dressed on her bed, already wearing the Leibchen to the garters of which she has attached the mutilated long stockings.

Pünktchen wears prim dresses which seems appropriate for a wealthy little girl in 1953. Anton wears shirts and short pants. Anton wears knee siocks. The image on the previous page shows him wearing knee socks. Anton is is a poor boy, but notice that this is not apparent from the image here. By the 1950s the class differences once detectable in clothing were disappearing. For this reason, Kastner's story does not fit well in a post-World War II setting. Long stockings were still worn in the 1950s, especially the early 50s, but were rapidly gong out of style. I believe they were being seen by the 1950s as rather old fashioned and were probably most common among less-fashionable working class and rural families. A reader writes, "Anton does not wear long stockings. Austrian boys often wore long stockings with short trousers in the 1950s throughout the year, but this was declining in the 1950s." The most prominent feature of Pünktchen's poor girl costume is brown long stockings into which she has deliberately cut large holes. Here we see her getting dressed as a poor girl (figure 1). This is the way she imagines poor girls dress. An interesting feature of Punkchten's disguise is the Leibchen that she wears--a sleeveless undershirt with reinforcements over the shoulders and down the front and back with four elastic garters attatched to hold up the stockings. She already has this garment in her wardrobe. The Leibchen is clearly shown in the movie and is the kind of garment also worn by boys. (Another example of the same underwear is shown in another film, "Aimee and Jaguar"). A reader writes, "The long stockings that Punkchten wears represent HER VIEW of the way poor girls dressed. But she already had the stockings and Leibchen in her wardrobe, so she must have worn these garments legitimately as part of her normal dress--at least in the fairly recent past. Some of our photos on HBC show that middle-class kids wore long stockings in the mid-1950s--not only poor or rural children. So I don't think we should confuse her child's idea of what poor girls wore with the actuality. I think you are correct that long stockings were passing out of style. But I think also that children or all classes wore them in certain areas and on certain occasions."

Created: 6:02 PM 8/10/2009
Last updated: 7:52 PM 8/12/2009