Figure 1.--Here is Leonard Cother aged 2.5 years on his rocking horse. He is an American boy. The tunic has sailor styling and looks rather like a dress, in part because of his age. Leonard wears ringlet curls with his tunic. Image courtesy of the RG collection.

American boys who still had long hair were most likely to wear it in ringlets. This was most common in the late 1880s and 1890s, and still not uncommon in the 1900s. Of course tunics were not only worn in the late 129th and early 20th century. We note tunics being wirn in the early 19th century. We note few images of boys wearing ringlet curls with tunics in the early 19th century, but we have relatively few images of early 19th century tunics so we are not sure to what extent ringlets were worn. Ringlet curls for boys became much less common in the 1910s and rarely seen by the 1920s. This is a very similar time frame for tunic suits. As a result, a substantail number of images of American boys in rinlet curls are seen wearing tunics. This is especially true of turn of the century images. The tunic was an extremely popular garmennt. Most noys wearing tunics did not have ringlets, but the tunic was so widely worn that there are still a sizeable number of images of boys in tunics wearing ringlets.

Created: 6:01 AM 9/27/2004
Last updated: 6:01 AM 9/27/2004