Figure 1.--This studio portrait shows a 4-year-old on his birthday. Notice the four candles on the cake which presumably was a studio prop. The portrait is undated, but looks like it was probably taken in the 1910s or early 20s. The unidentified boy wears a button-on sailor suit with colored dicky and black long stockings worn over long underwear. Note the bulges under the stockings. Long underwear was fairly common under long stockings in America, as we can see from many of the waist union suit advertisements for boys. These union suits have long legs but also provision (usually pin tubes of tape loops) for the attachment of supporters. You can see one of the supporter buttons on the boy's right leg. Note the hightop shoes.

We notice burron on outfits done in many different styles. The skeleton suit was thefirst example of button-on stuling we notice. We have relatively little information on American skeleton suits. As far as we can tell,, they were essentially the same as the ones being worn in Britain, but it was a generalized European style. We believe they were worn into the 1830s. We do not see much in the way of button-on outfits in the early photography of the 1840s and 1850s. Clothing details are often indestincr in early photographs, especilly the 1840s Daguerreotypes. Tunic type outfits seem to dominate. With the 1860s we see a varietyy of outfits that look rather like jump suits. They were button on matching shirt-like tops and pants. We do not know how they were described at the time. They do not look much like button-on suits because the style for some reason was to cover over the buttons with a kind of matching waist piece. We see these outfits in the 1870s as well. Button-on styling was less common in the late 19th century. We see a variety of button-on oufits in the early-20th century, beginning in the 1910s. Many were Oliver Twisrt suits. We also see sailor suits, some of which might be included in the Oliver Twist category. We see a variety of shorts sets dome as button-on outfits after World War I in the 1920s and 30s. These were more casual outfits. The shirts and pants did not match, but were done with coordinated colors. We also see fancy blouses and pants, usually shorts in the 20th century. These were often done for yiunger boys attending formal events like weddings.

Created: 3:44 AM 8/17/2008
Last updated: 3:44 AM 8/17/2008