Figure 1.--These unidentified English siblings were photographed with their hats. They look to be about 5-7 years old. The girl's hat is highly decorated. The boy's hat is very plain except for the streamers. We are not quite sure how to dare it as there is no mount, perhaps the 1890s. We get a good view of the boy's streamers on his sailor hat. There was also a youbger sister. The girl here also presumably had streamers on her hats, although you can't see them.

English boys wore streamers with different types of headwear. We see boys wearing streamers on both caps and hats. This was most common with sailor headwear. And sailor headwear included both caps and hats. This included rounded crown hats which seem somewhat related to sailor hats, at least in appearance. Here we see a boy with a flat-top hat and medium brim with twin streamers (figure 1). We are not sure what to call this hat, but would guess that it woulkd have been seen as a sailor hat. Unfortunately because of the standard studio frontal pose, we can not see the streamers, but we think thar they wer none-the--less very common with sailor headwear. While streamers are most associated with sailor headwear, we also notice them on Scottish headwear, both Balmorals and Glengarys. Scottish styles were popular for English boys in the 19th century. Streamers were also sometimes added to berets and tams. Most other headwear was not worn with streamers.

Created: 3:24 AM 6/23/2013
Last updated: 9:32 PM 10/14/2016