Children Getting Dressed Project


Figure 1.-- Younger school age boys like Carl wore more mature styles. Boys still commonly wore suits to school. Sailor suits were still popular, although only worn by a minority of boys to school. Younger boys up to 10 years wore blouses without suit jackets with knee pants during the summer. Another favourite was the sailor suit.

The great majority of images on HBC are single shot portraits or snapshots. We have a few sectiins where we have a set of images on the same boy or family to see how fashions varied over time. What we do not have, however, is how the various garments intereacted with each other. Getting dressed is a relatively simple matter today. Earlier it was more complicated. Children might wear button on clothing. There were also undewaists to hold up pants and stocking supporters to hold up long stockings. Underwear also used to be different and without central heating a more important part of a child's wardrobe. We thought it might be useful to look at hypothetical families from different countries during different decades. We have begun sections on America and Germany.

Countries

We thought it might be useful to look at hypothetical families from different countries during different decades. We have begun sections on America and Germany and our project will focus largely on those two countries. This is in part because we know more about those countries than other countries. Our limited resources will not allow us to go into any great detail on other countries at this time. We do hope, however, to create a few pages illustrating the destinctibe national styles of clothing in other countries. In addition, we will link pages in HBC that provide information about getting dressed in fifferent countries. An example here is a Russian illustration from a children's book.

Social Class

We are going to focus on the middle class for our Getting Dressed project. We plan, however, to produce some pages to show how children from other classes dressed. Of course we can not begin to deal with every class in the detail that we have for the middle class. This is just beyond our resources to acomplish. We will, however, create some pages to give an idea of other children in different countries over time.

Chronologies

We are doing our Getting Dressed Project by decades. Thus you will eventually be able to see how children got dressed in different decades and how that varies in different countries. We have based the clothing depicted in the various decaded on the paintings, photographs, and catalogs we have archived in HBC and Album1900. So far we have begun the 1890s and 1920s, but we hope to complete a series of studies from the 1870s through the 1940s. This is an enormous undertaking so it will be some time before we complete this project.

Garments

The great majority of images on HBC are single shot portraits or snapshots. We have a few sectiins where we have a set of images on the same boy or family to see how fashions varied over time. What we do not have, however, is how the various garments intereacted with each other. Getting dressed is a relatively simple matter today. Earlier it was more complicated. Children might wear button on clothing. There were also undewaists to hold up pants and stocking supporters to hold up long stockings. Underwear also used to be different and without central heating a more important part of a child's wardrobe. We are depicting quite a wide range of garments in our Getting Dressed project. The goal is to show how the childre were dressed and how the various garments related to each other. This will be done by three major catehories in each decade: underwear, support garment and hosiery, and outer garments. We are of course most familiar with outer garmenrs because of the substantialm archive of portraits and snapshots. Less familiar is the underwar and support garments. These garments are not show in the photographs and many are no longer worn to day.

Hair Styles


Album1900

This is a joint undertaking with Album1900. The charming illustrations in this section are the work of a German librarian, Birte Koch. Birte is not only a librarian and illustrator, she is also the web master of Album1900. This is a wonderful website which focuses on German family life in the 19th and 20 centuries. Her archive of images shared with us in her site provide a fascinating insight into German family life over time.

Information Needed

Do let us know if you have any comments or suggestions about our project. We are especially interested in any insights you may have about the actual procedure of getting dressed for the various decades. Perhaps you recall some aspect of getting dressed that you recall from your childhood or perhaps you have some information from historic periods. Or perhaps you see a mistake that we may have made in the garments illustrated. Do let us know so we can work that information into Our Getting Dressed Project.








HBC

Album1900



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Created: 1:28 AM 9/2/2005
Last updated: 3:51 AM 9/3/2005