Figure 1.--This Civil War era CDV portrait shows two unidentified brothers. The boys wear collar buttoning jackets and light-colored pants that do not match the jackets. That was more common in the 1850s than the 60s. Note how the two sides of the jacket st the waist are rounded rather than square cut like most collar-buttoning jackets. These rounded corners were more common with cut-away jackets. We know the photograph was taken during 1864-66 because there was a 2 cent revenue stamp on the back. The portrait was taken by W. Shaw in Schenectady, New York.

Cut-away jacket suits were a style popular duriung much of the time that collar-buttoning jackets were worn. Most collar-buttoning jackets buttoned all the way down and not just at the collar. The number of buttons varied. In the mid-19th century there could be quite a number of buttons. This depended in part on the age/size of the boy. We see kackets with 6-10 buttons and suspect that there were some jackets with even more buttons. Gradually over time as we reach the end of the century we see the number of buttons decline, nbut they tended to be highter than the lapel jackets as there was more of the jacket that had to be buttones. Most of these jackets had right angle sides where the two sides meet at he bottom of the jacket. The jacket the boys on the previous page are wearing is a good example. We see some fusing of the collar-buttoning and cut-way style. Sometimes boys mightwear their cut-away open, rather like a cut-away jacket. We note a Philadelphia boy, probably in the 1860s who is a good example. We see other examples such as collar-buttoning jackets that have rounded rather than squared off bottom corner sides. The boy here is a good example (figure 1). This is the style of most cut-away jackets, but less commonly the collar-buttoning jackets. Only the collar-buttoning jackets are not cut-way to any extent for these collar-buttoning jackets.

Created: 11:47 PM 5/9/2018
Last updated: 11:47 PM 5/9/2018