Figure 1.--This tin-type portrait looks like the children of a family. There are four children, two bioys and two girls who look to be about 7-18 years old. The three children in front all wear long stockings. Two have striped stockings and one boy has solid colored dark stockings. The portrait is not dated, but looks like the late-1870s to us.

Long stocking decade trends generlly follow the samr pattern as knee pants. HBC at this times believes that long stockings developed as the same time as knee pants. It was not considered appropriate for boys or girls to have bare legs, except for the very youngest. As boys began to wear shortened-length pants, the short socks they had worn with long pants were replaced with long stockings. We see that to some extent in the 1860s, but many boys were still wearing long pants. It was in the 1870s that we begin to see large numbers of boys wearing knee pants and thus long stockings. As knee pants became increasing common in the 1870s, boys began to wear long stockings. They were mostly younger boys, but large ni=umbers of then. Tights were not worn instead children were wearing long stockings. They were the same long stockings as worn by girls. Fashion articles provide some information about hosiery. Harper's Bazaar in a 1877 article "Small Boy's Clothes" suggested that socks which at the time were three-quarter length should be only worn by younger children, but that most boys wore long stockings. Long stockings continued to be worn by children, including older boys and girls, throughout the 19th Century. We have numerous portraits from the late 19th archived on HBC. A good example here are two Indianapolis brothers wearing fancy Fauntleroy blouses and floppy bows. Unfortunately many are undated. We can usually make a rough approximation, but of course that is not as good as an actual date. Especially it makes it difficult to sort the images by decade and better identify trends

Created: 3:45 PM 9/15/2023
Last updated: 3:45 PM 9/15/2023