Figure 1.--This cabinenet card portrait shows four children from a fashionable Frabkfurt family. They look to be about 3-10 years of age. There are two boys and a girl. We are not sure about the gender of the youngest child sitting on the hobby horse. The girls seems to be wearing a frilly pinafore over her dress. The older boy wears a velvet cut-away jacket suit, but without any Fauntleroy styling. The boy at the left with a horse whip wears a Fauntleroy kilt suit. The tartan kilt skirt has no kilt features. It is not even pleated. Notice the props have gender connotations, a whip for the boy and the watering can for the girl. This is ine reason we think the younger child may be a boy. All the children wear long stockings. We believe the portrait was taken in the 1890s. The studio was Schmidt in Frankfurt.

We have not yet been able to build a chronology of kilts and kilt suits worn by German boys, but we have begun to work on it. This is primarily because we have found relatively few examples in the photographic record. This presumable reflects the prevalence. Another problem is that most of the German images are undated. The images that we have found seem to date about 1870s-1900s based on our estimates. Kilt and kilt suit images outside this time span are very rare. While not precise, our estimates are generally accurate at least to the decade involved. Here we have to estimate as the photographs are not dated. This is about the same chronological range as we have noted in the United States and Britain where the fashion wa much more prevalent. We note some kilt outfits with Fauntleroy styling in the 1890s. A good example is a fashionable Frankfurt family. A boy there wears a Fauntleroy kilt suit with a tartan skirt--there is no indiction of kilt styling. Fauntleroy styling like kilt outfits was not nearly as common in Germany as in Anerica and Britain.

Created: 7:46 AM 2/27/2013
Last updated: 7:46 AM 2/27/2013