Figure 1.--This is a difficult image to interpret, as many French images are. The child could be a girl, but I believe girls mostly wore dresses in the eary 20th Century and were unlikely to appear in a blouse like shirt. Also the child appears to be wearing short pants and cuffed kneesocks which would almost certainly be a boy. Both boys and girls might have long hair, although it was becoming less common for the boys.

We note many French boys wearing blouses in the early-20th century. Fancy blouses for younger boys became quite popular in the late-19 century. They were often worn with suits like Fauntleroy suits. After the turn-of-the century they were increasingly worn without a suit jacket, althouhgh jackets were still much more common than today, which means we often do not see the shirt-like common other than the collar. It was increasingly felt less necessary for a boy to be dressesd up in a full suit. Thus a number of boys' outfit were worn with with shirts or blouses. We commonly see them worn with knee pants and than short pants. This was a common outfit for middle-class boys. These blouses could be quite fancy. Many were back buttoning, even for boys. They were mostly worn with short pants. A very popular blouse style was the sailor blouse. A good example of blouse and other styles in a church scene about 1910. Notice all the sailor blouses. Most of these images we have seen are from postcards. and many of these fancy blouses had longish hair, sometimes quite long hair falling to the boy's shoulders. We do not think this was very common and this is confirmed by the phographic record. Post cards we believe often did portrayed how mothers wanted to dress their boys and not always how the boys were ctually dressed. We hope to add more actual photographs to our French archive to better assess actual French blouse trends.

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Created: 7:06 PM 2/14/2016
Last updated: 7:06 PM 2/14/2016