Figure 1.--Here we see a pair identified as Fred. We can not make out the studio, butit was somewhere in Iowa. Fred wers a dress tht could easily have been worn vy his ister. He looks about 3-4 yers old. The portrait is undated. It looks like a late-1860s CDV to us, but could have been the early-70s. It is a little difficult to be sure as many of the mountindiators we normally use are contradictory.

We note quite a number of boys wearing skirted garments in the 1860s, but not as many as we might have expected given the huge increase in the number of photographic portraits taken with the apperance of the CDV. We this are not at all sure about the prevalence of skirtd garments and the age conventiojd. We comtinue to see boys wearing dresses in the 1860s. Photography began toprovide images in the 1840s but it is not until the 1860s and the 1860s and the CDV that we begin to se really large numbers of images. And for the first time we have a substantial number of images of boys wearing dresses. We think that this is not only because there are much larger numbers of CDVs, but because you could write on a CDV, we have more individuals identified as boys. The dresses we see boys wearing look very much like the same dresses girls wore. We do not see any of what might be called boy dresses. And We also see an important new garment, the kilt suit. We are not entirely sure when this garment appeared, but we definitely see examples by the 1860s. We also continued to see some tunics, but not very many of them. We are not sure about pinafores.

Created: 8:08 AM 12/16/2014
Last updated: 8:08 AM 12/16/2014