English Boys Suit Trousers: Long Pants Chronology--19th Century


Figure 1.--This CDV portrait shows an unidentified boy wearing aut-away jacket suit with a vest and long trouswrs. He has a small white collar and what looks like a small bow tie. He looks to be about 8-9 years old. He is posed by what looks like a music stand , but without an instrument. Perhaps it was meant to be a speakers stand which might explain the what we think may be a stick. A reader thinks it is mausical instrument. He writes, "If you look carefully at the bottom of the "stick" you will see it has a horn opening making the stick resemble a clarinet. Also you can see air holes." The studio informtion on the back refers to the London International Exhibition in 1872. This suggests gives us the approximate time frame. The studio was Alfred Chambers in Clapham, a London neighborhood.

Long pants became standard for boys in the early-19th century. The skeleton suit was the first dedicated boy's garment and long pants became standard for skeleton suits. at the beginning of the 19th century. This included tounger boys after breeching. Men also began wearing long pants in he early-19th century. Long pants were worn almost exclusively until the mid-19th century. Several different types of shortened-length trousers appeared at mid-century for younger boys. This is a little difficult to follow at mid-century because there are so few British Dags and Ambros. With the advent if the CDV in the 1860s we have a much larger photographic record to work with. But only younger boys wore them for some time. Older boys continued to wear long pants suits into the late-19th century. We notice younger boys wearing bloomer knickers and knee pants suits . Subsequently knickers also appeared. These shortened-length pants gradually became more commonly worn in the second half of the 19th century. At first only younger boys wore these shortened-length trousers, but they gradually not only became more common, but we see older boys wearing them as well. We note yoonger teenage boys wearing knicker suits at boarding school, but not all schools. This varies quite a bit. We see boys wearing shortened-lngth suits in the 1870s, but mostly only to about 8-10 years of age and even many younger boys still wore long pants suits. We still see boys mostly wearing long pants suits through the 1870s and not just teenagers. . School uniforms somewhat complicates the subject of suits. Some boys had suits which they wore when not a school, but many boys wore their school uniforms as a suit when dressing up. Here a factor was the family's affluence. Long pants seem more common in England than America during the 19th century. e see many teen age American boys wearing knee pants by the 1890s. This was much less common in Britain. Only in the 20th century did this begin to change.







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Created: 7:07 AM 5/4/2016
Last updated: 7:08 AM 5/4/2016