Figure 1.--This little German boy with cropped hair was from Canstatt. He wears a rather plain velvet suit. The CDV portrait looks to have been taken about 1890. Notice his flat-crown sailor hat propped up at the lower left. There was a colored hat band, but no streamers. The best images of these hats are portraits like this when the boys were not wearing them.

Many German sailor hats were made with decorative hat bands or tallies and streamers. We know more about the cap tallies than the hat tallies. The tallies wete normlly black, but there were other colors. While the black and white phitography of the day does not tell us what colors were used, we can clearly see that not all the hat bands were black. The hat band on the boy's hat here was cleared a colored band (figure 1). The tallies sometimnes with gold lettering. This seems to have been more common on sailor caps than on the hats. The tallies might gave ship names or the names of German states and cities. There was also a bow at the side. The streamers were also normally black. While most German sailor hats the bands/tallies, not all had streamers. This is a little difficult to assess because the streamers in available portraits are often difficult to observe. Most portraits were full frontal shots and the back streamer was thus obscured. In addition, mothers and photographers commonly positioned the hat slanted up so the boy's face and hair are visible, but this mean that the crown with the hat band and streamer cannot be seen. Often the best views we get of sailor hats is when they are placed off to the side and not actually worn.

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Created: 12:18 AM 9/3/2008
Last updated: 12:18 AM 9/3/2008