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We note a wide range of underwear offered for children throughout the 1920s. There were destinctive styles and weights for seasonal wear. We still see a range of old fashioned styles. Boys and girls, especialy younger children, still tended to wear similar underwear, but there were special styles such as bloomers for older girls. Union suits were still very common. We do not yet see modern underwear styles. Underwear was widely advertized in mailorder catalogs, national periodicals, and local newspapers which provide a great deal of information about period underwear styles. This is important because underwear does not show up much in the photographic rercord.
Haines in 1921 placed a magazine ad for its winter union suits (figure 1). Union suits were still an underwear standard for both boys and girls in the 1920s. The Haines ad showed what boys wore under their winter clothes. The company described their union sduits as ;fleecy" and stressed commfor above all else.
This Nazareth underwear ad in the Ladies Home Journal (July, 1921, p. 121) has some interesting information about children's support garments and why some were chosen over others. It has some new information about underwear ages and choices between standard underwaists and waist union suits.
This newspaper ad for boys' Sexton summer underwear appeared in the Lima Ohio News (June 6, 1921) at the point in the year when children would be shifting to cooler kinds of underwear. The boy illustrated in the ad (probably about 11 years old) is wearing a light-weight sleeveless cotton union suit (of "dimity" material, similar in weight to nainsook but of a smoother texture) material) with adjustable shoulder straps, waist buttons for trousers that button on, and reinforcement straps over the shoulders to provide greater strength to the tabs at the sides for fastening hose supporters. Most schoolboys in 1921 wore long stockings even in the summer time. The suit has loose short legs. There is an alternative style for both boys and girls, but different legs for each gender. The boys had loose knees and the girls elasticized bloomer knees. The manufacturer is a firm called Sexton that made underwear and nightwear for children in the 1920s.
A panty waist was a term used for wais union suit in the early 20-th century. Today, the coloquial meany of a sissy boy is the primary meaning of the term. This was not the original meaning which was anotherterm for waist union suit. A waist union suit was diffeent than an ordinary union suit in that it had features of a waist--a garment with support features like byttons to hold upn other garments like pants, skirts and long stockings. We note a newspAper advertisement in the Salt Lake Telegram (December 7, 1921). It was a full-page ad for children's and women's underwear. The Keith-O'Brien Company, a dry goods store in Salt Lake, was having a big sale that featured as many
as "300 undergarments for women and children". One of the most prominent items (taking up about a quarter of the page) was an "Extra Special" offer of "Panty Waist Union Suits" for boys and girls and featuring a boy of perhaps 9 or 10 years of age playing athletically with weights and wearing the garment which normally sold for $1.35 but was now on sale for 65 cents.
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