Figure 1.--Here we see a studio portrait bought this photo of three upper-class children from a comfortable middle-class Buenos Aires family in 1932. The children are not identifoed. The boy seems to be about 13-14 years old. The girls look to be about 10-13 years old. The youngest girl is wearing white ankle socks with white shoes and a white dress. Her big brother is elegantly dressed in a three-piece short trousers suit which includes a vest with white shirt and tie, dark long stockings (probably with a suspender waist and supporters) and low cut black shoes. The older girl wears white three-quarter socks. Notice the hair styles of the girls--bobbed but with bangs, a style that became fashionable in the middle and late 1920s.

The variety of hosiery is greater than elsewhere in Latin America, except perhaps Chile, in part because of the climate. The substantial European influence is also a factor. Thus we only see long stockings to any extent in the Southern Cone. We do not have any written information about long stockings in Argentina. Nor do we have any catalog information. We believe Argentine children wore long stockings in the 19th and early-20th centuriues, although we are not sure just how common this was. We do not have sufficent information at this time. We have some information from the photoigraphic record. We can not yet confirm this for the 19h century because of our limited archive, we do note Argentine children, including boys, in the photographic record wearing long stockings during the early-20th century. A good example is two older boys wearing black long stockings with shirt pats suits about 1930. Here we see see a younger boy wearing long stockings wiyh a heavy overcoat in 1941 (figure 1). Argentina is one of the more Europeanized Latin American countries. We suspect this was a European style. Fashion of course a the time was largely determined in Europe. Argentina in the late-19th and early-20th century was a destination country for European emigration. The most important country involved was Italy. We are not sure just how common long stockings were in Argentina. Most of the images we see wiyh boys wearing long stockings show boys wear suits or othr dressy out fits. Unlike Germany and America, they do not seem to have been worn for every-day wear, although our Argentine archive is still limited.

Created: 3:05 AM 7/12/2007
Last updated: 9:32 PM 7/12/2015