** children's clothing








Children's Clothing

boys' garments
Figure 1.--This portrait shows a German middle-class famiy, we think in the 1930s. Until World War II, children in many countries wore destinctive clothes. It is thus often possible to identify where they were from by the way they were dressed. After the war, especially by the 1970s we begin to see pan-European fashions heavily influenced by American styles.

Fashion probably began with the dawn of humnity. This was a first presumably personal adornment. Some anthropologists believe that spotting sunlight shimmering on water was important to finding water. And thus himans wer attracted to shiny things. Here color was also important. And based on primitive peopke today, iy is not always women that are most concerned about fashion and adornment. Clothing followed with the advance of technology and the movemnnt out of Africa. Every civilization that followed had clothing and adornrent as features of their desctincive cultures. And clothing would play an important pat in history. Pastoralism and the production of wool was an important step in human developoment. Silk was at the core of the first commerical contct beteen East and West--the Silk Road. The quest for furs helped to open the American frontier. Cotton was at the heart of the industrial Revolution which was central in creating the modern world. And studies of history aimed at decrbinhg life style and understanding every day life have to included fashion and clothing. As a young teacher, my students would asl life style questions for the various era we studies. I was ill prepared to anser these questions and in the days before the internet, this kind of information was not easy to find. Here we are building a resource that teachers and students can use to find fashion and clothing informationin vrious countrues and historical periods.

Boys' Clothing

Boys have been dressed in innumerable different styles over the past 500 years. For most of that period boys simply wore smaller versions of their parents clothes. Little boys and girls were generally dressed alike in nearly identical dresses to their mothers until the boys were "breeched", usually at 4 to 6 years of age--although some boys were breached earlier and some later. After being breached, boys during most of this period were dressed in miniature editions of their parents' clothes.

Girls' Clothing

HBC has received so many request by readers for information on girls' fashions that we have decided to provide an index of pages with images of girls' fashions. We had hoped that someone would launch a sister site so to speak. While we do not have the time to persue the styles involved in detail, the images illustrated may prove helpful to readers. We welcome reader comments on the styles illustrated and will post any comments received on the styles involved. We have just recently decided to do this. It will thus be some time before we can list the HBC pages allready loaded. We will try to list all the appropriate new pages as we create them. We will just load pages with particularly clear or noteworthy pages here.










HBC






Navigate the Boys' Historical Clothing Web Site:
[Return to the Main History page]
[Return to the Main Topics page]
[Introduction] [Biographies] [Chronology] [Climatology] [Clothing] [Disease and Health] [Economics] [Geography] [Human Nature] [Law]
[Nationalism] [Presidents] [Religion] [Royalty] [Science] [Social Class] [Royalty]
[Bibliographies] [Contributions] [FAQs] [Glossaries] [Images] [Links] [Registration] [Tools]
[Boys' Clothing Home]






Created: 1:15 AM 3/2/2014
Last updated: 1:15 AM 3/2/2014