Figure 1.--Here we see two unidentified brothers wearing shirts. As the CDV portrait has Civil War tax stamps, we know it was taken sometime about 1865. The boys are not wearing jackets so we see various features of 1860s shirts. The shirts are bot patterned as was common before One boys has a white collar that does not seem to be a part of the shirt. Notice the matching wrist cuffs. The younger brother does not have a collar, but a kind of ruffled trim. Also notice the full sleeves, especially on the younger boy. Both boys were button-on shirts. The waist buttons of the younger boy are covered by a waistband. The boys also had suits. Put your cursor on the image to see their suits about a year later, probanly about 1866.

We see more boys wearing suit jackets in the 1860s, but the appearance of the CDV provides us so many image that we can still assess shirt trends in the 1860s. The most obsrveable part of the shirt, however, because of all the jackets is the collar and cuffs. Boys tended to wear blouses and shirts with very small or even no collar at all in the 1860s. We see far fewer patterened shirts than in the 40s and 50s. Some blouses do not seem to have had collars. A good example is an unidentified boy. You can often often barely see what type of collar was being worn when worn with suits during the 1860s. We see a lot of boys wearing plaid shirt-like tunics and shirts in the mid-19th century. Suit jackets were very common and we can often only see the jacket and vest. Thus we often do not see the shirts boys are wearing. Often only a small collar shows over the jacket and vest. Suits with cut-away jackets became popular for younger boys in the 1860s. Here we sometimes see more of the blouses they are wearing. We continue to see shirts with sleeves that often blouse out at the wrist cuff. And we begin to see button-on outfits that look almost like one-piece outfits. The unidentified boy here is a good example (figure 1). The blouses with these button-on outfirs had attached mostly standard relativey small collars. And we see mre boys with neckwear during the 60s.

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Created: 1:06 AM 3/10/2014
Last updated: 1:06 AM 3/10/2014