Figure 1.--This Belgian boy for his First Communiin wears a short pants suit with long stockings. We do not know, however, if he is a Flemish or Waloon boy as both were Catholic. (A relic of the Spanish victory in Flnders during the Dutch War of indepence.) Thus we are unable to glean much insight concerning long stocking trends from portraits that do not identify names or at least where the portraits were taken. A reader writes, "Can you date the image and give the approximate age of the boy. To me he appears to be about 12 or 13 years old." The portrait is undated, but we would guess was taken in the 1930s. The boy does look to be in the 11-13 year range. That is quite a bit older than the moder age for First Communib gich is avout 7 years of age.

We are not sure at this time about differences between the Waloons and Flemish as concerns hosiery. We do note that more Belgian boys wore long stockings than French boys. Altthough it should be pointed out that French boys did sometimes wear long stockings for formal occassions. There seems to be some similarity concerning Belgian long stockings usage with Germany, although long stockings do not seem to be as common in Belgium as Germany. What we are unsure about at this time is if the boys wearing long stockings were mostly Flemish boys or if hosiery trends were basically the same throughout Belgium. We suspect that there were fashipn differences associayed with the linguistic/cultural divide in Belgium. This is difficult to determine because most of the available images do not identify the boys in the portraits and other photographs. Hopefully Belgian readers will be able to provide some insights here.

Created: 11:12 PM 1/15/2008
Last updated: 7:34 AM 1/16/2008