Figure 1.--This unidentified German boy who looks to be about 13-years old. The backgrond suggests aural area. He holds his mandolin and wears Lederhosen with very long black long stockings. The snapshot is undated, but we would gueess was taken in the 1940s. By that time we see increasingly short short pants like the boy is wearing. These long stockings much hve been very long indeed. They look almost like tights, but tights were nmot yet available in the 1940s.

Short pants varies in length. It is normlly difficukt to tell the length of the stockings unless the shorts are cut to shorter lengths. Short pants could still ber very long in the 1920s and early-30s. As short pants appeared after World War I and became shorter in the 1930s, much longer-length long stockings were needed. We see boys wearing short-cut shorts in the late-30s and 40s when long stockings were still very common. A good example is a farm boy, probably in the late 1940s. Many of the examples we have found with boys wearing very long long stockings come from rural areas where were clothing tgended to be more traditional than fashionable. And dressing warmly was important because boys spent more time outdoors. Some of the shorts are so short that the long stockings worn with them look almost like tights, but tights did not appear in Germany until after the mid-1950s. We are not sure what the actual measurements of these long-length stockings are, but they seem yho come all the way up to the top of the leg.