Figure 1.--This cabinet card portrait shows two unidentified brothers. They look to be about 5-8 years old. The younger boy wears a button on outft which may been called a sailor suit. Note the heavy striping/piping and buttons which is continued in a modest way on the side of the pants. His brother wears a very plain cut-away jacket. There is no decoration on his pants except the three buttons at the leg hem. Notice the streamers on the younger boy's hat. The cabnet card is undated, but looks like the early-70s to us. The mount does not even have the studio informtion at the bottom. We know from the back of the mount that the boys were from San Francisco.

Suit decoration varied widely. Some suits had none at all. Most had very little. With other suits we note many varied kinds of decoration. It seems that decorative elements were most commpn pnsuits for younger boys. This includes buttons, embroidery, frogging, piping, ruffles, striping, and other elements. We have found exanples of all these different decoration types in the anple photographic record. We note lace being used such the outfit the boy on the previous page. Here we see a San Francisco boy with elaborate striping and buttons being used to decorte his suit (figure 1). This may have been called a sailor, we are not sre. Also notice the buttons. . This was, however, not very common. These decorations were mostly on the jackets. But we see some decoration on the pants/trousers as well. Usually this was a reduced version of the jacket decoration. This was not as common as the decoration on the jackets, but we do see it. The primry decoration on trousers was a narrow vertical stripe, but this was most common on long trousers. They were not the only decoration, especially in the 1870s when decoration was the most common. Knee pants were he most heavily decorated pants, on part because knee pants were becomng popular for younger boys when the fashion of heavily decorating suits became especually popular. Not all of the jacket decoration was carried over onto the pants, but we do see some of this. We also see embroidery, commonly matching emrroidery on the jacket.

Created: 12:42 AM 8/29/2016
Last updated: 12:43 AM 8/29/2016