Figure 1.--This family snapshot has no information assiciated with it. The home and yard look very American to us, probably taken in the early-1920s. The two brothers have their scaled-down chairs and seem to be wearing matching smocks with short pants, although it is a little difficult to tell. The boys also are wearing white socks and double-bar closed-toe sandals. A reader wrires, "These boys are happy and leave amused at whatever they were doing the day they were photographed. It was a happy situation the boys were in. We enjoy their happiness."
As best we can tell, few Americab boys have worn smocks. We have found relatively few images of smocks in America, even for girls. Our American archive is so large that we believes this is am accurate relection if the populsrity of smocks. And we rarely see American children, especially boys, wearing smocks. American children in contrat to mamy European children did not wear smocks. As far as we can tell from the photigraphic record, socks were not at all popular. And they were not worn as a school or olay garment, unlike the case of everal Europen countries. Smocks did not begin as a child's grment, but were worn by European farmers and workers. This was never the case in America. One weakness in our assessment is that smocks began to be worn by children in Europe during the late-19th century. At that time there were no amateur snapshots as we now know them. Photographs were taken at studios and were major events in which children were dressed up in their best clothes. As smocks were considered informal dress suitable for wear around the house, children did not commonly have their photographs taken in smocks even though they commonly wore them. Even so, we believe that they wre not very common even in the 19th century. And of coiurse the very extensive 20th century photogrphic shows that they were not very common.
