Figure 1.--This German cabinet card was priobably taken about 1910. The unidentified boy wears a traditional sailor suit wide a wide-brimmed sailor hat. The school goodie cone tells us the boywas 6-years old and just begging school. It was one pf the new thiner cards (7.9 cm x 16.8 cm) that were popular after the turn-of-the 20th century. The studio was Joh. Niclou Chemnitz in Saxony. The Germans called these cards "Handtuchformat" (towel format).

The most destinctive feature of a sailor hat was the brim. This was especially the case for a wide-brimmed hat. We note sailor hats done with varying brim widths. The most striking ones were the wide-brimmed hats. Smaller boys seem most lost in them. Wide-brimmed hats became quite popular by the 1890s. At first we see more of these hats than sailor caps. Wide-brimmed sailor hats were especially popular for younger boys. Several images of German boys wearing broad-brimmed sailor hats are atrchived on HBC. A good example is an unidentified German boy. Sailor hats were normally worn with brims turned up. A fashion of turning down the brim became popular in the 1910s. Wide brimmed hats seem today rather a decorative rather than a practical headwear style. There was, however, a practical aspect to them. Light complexions were considered more attractive at the time. Thus for children a wide-brimmed sailor hat was a kind of early sun-safe garment. We continue to see wide-brimmed sailor hats in the 1900s, but in the 1910s they begin to decline in popularity, especially after the start of World War (1914). Wide-nrimed sailor caps wwereworn by pre-school boys and younger primary school boys. Here we see a 6-year old boy just befinning school wearing ione (figure 1). Girls also wore them. but the largest seems to be more common with boys. At leastv they looked larger. As older girls wore sailor hats, their hats were probably larger. We also seem to detect a social-class factor. They seem most common with boys from affluent families. Wide-brimmed sailor hats were almost always straw hats.

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Created: 4:50 AM 12/11/2007
Last updated: 2:34 AM 7/18/2010