Belgian Boys Pants: Chronology


Figure 1.--This 7 year old Belgian boy weaes H-bar shorts in 1959. This was a popular style in Belgium and other European countries. His mame was Michael Engelbert d'Hollanderk. He had a popular Belgian and French radio orogram and had come to New York to klearn Enhlisha nd start an American show business career.

The Belgian chronological trends for pants are the same as for much of Europe. The popularity of the different types of pants varied over time. Men and boys commonly wore knee breeches in the 18th century. These breeches had nothing to so with age. This did not begin to change until the French Revolution. Revolutinaries along with the urban and rural poor adopted the sans cullote style of long pants. The style was at first not widely accepted by the fashionable elite except for boys. The boys began wearing skeleton suits with long pants (1800s). Adult men did not begin to make the shift until later (1810s). Our informatiom on Belgian pants are limited, especially until the mid-19th century. Belgian boys mostly wore long pants in the first half of the 19th century. After mid-century, knee pants became more common. And with the advent of photograpgy (1840s) we can follow this in some detail. Unfortunately we do not have many 19th century and the ones we have are all from the later 19th century and are mostly studio portaits. We have more information on the 20th century and both studiomportaits and famoly sbapshotds. Short pants became more common by the 1910s as knee pants gradually transitioned into shorts. It is often difficult to identify the two as the first short pants were quite long. The growing popularity of the Boy Scout movement which appearedd early in the20th century was probably a factor here in popularizing short pants. And Belgian boys after World War I mostly wore shorts. Shorts were very commonly worn by Belgian boys through the 1950s. Beginning in the 1960s we see more Beklgian boys wearing long pamts. And jeans begin to become popular.







HBC






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Created: 5:43 AM 11/7/2019
Last updated: 5:43 AM 11/7/2019