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Figure 1.--This Sargent painting of 19?? depicts Essie, Ruby, and Ferdinand Wertheimer. Ferdinand wears a classic Eton suit, the formal dress for boys at the turn of the century that had graduated from Fauntleroy and sailor suits. The Eton suit became standard dress wear for affluent British and American boys. |
Formal Eton suits and collars were a style which lasted for about a
century in England and were also commonly worn in America. And offshoot
of
the Eton suit, a colarless jacket for little boys became a staple for
younger American boys
for an additional half century when the formal Eton suit had disapperared--
except of course at Eton College.
Eton College is one of the best known schools in the world. Americans
think of colleges as small universities. Colleges in most of the rest
of the world are secondary schools, as is Eton College, albeit a
prestigious one. Eton College
was founded in 1440, nearly 58 after the founding of Winchester
school, by William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, under the patronage of
Henry VI--the Scholar King, and with the title of "the College of the Blessed
Mary of Eaton beside Windsor." The buildings were completed between 1491
and 1523. The original buildings consist of two quadrangles containing
the chappel, the upper and lower schools, appartments for officials, the
library, and offices. The school has produced a long list of distinguished
former pupils, including Sir Robert Walpole, Robert Hartley, william Pitt the
Elder, Horace Walpole, the Duke of Wellington, Thomas Gray, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, William Ewart Gladstone.
Eton College is organized into a lower school for the younger boys who
enter at about 13-years old. Most boys enter after finishing private
preparatory schools,
although a small number of boys enter from the state
system. The older move on to the upper school. The school in 1950 had
over 1,000 students
of which only about 70 lived on the foundations and had scholarships. The
rest of the boys, called Opedians lived in "houses" under the supervision of masters.
Currently ... The curriculum which in the mid-19th Century was almost
entirely classical now covers the modern subjects.
School uniforms originated in England with the hospital schools founded
in the 16th Century. The boys at these schools were charity students and
their clothes were provided by the schools, which decided on identical
costumes. Some of the first outfits were monks cassocks which eventually
evolved to long tunic tunic outfits. The public (fee paying
private) schools of the day
allowed their boys, all from affluent families, to dress as they wanted.
Only in the 19th Century did the publivc schools implement uniforms. Conditions
at the public schools in the 18th and 19th Cenuries were caotic. Senior
boys ruled the school and it could be quite dangerous for the younger boys.
Academic standards were poor. Badly needed reforms in the mid-19th
century were to change this, fashioning the highly effective public
schools of modern Britain.
One of these reforms was a standard uniform for the boys. This was a major step as until the mid-19th Century, school uniforms were thought of as a costume for poor children at charity schools. Once introduced ans accepted, the public schools and developing preparatory schools embraced school uniforms with a pashion. A new boy at thse schools
Figure 2.--Boys a many exclusive English public schools wore what we now refrer to as Eton suits. The brothers here are Harrow students and the boys wear their school uniform in an outing with their father about 1910. |
Thus the idea of a school
uniform came full circle, from a garment for poor charity children to
a mark of the British elite. As a result, grammar (academically
selective secondary) schools and other state schools began copying the
prstigious public schools and introduced uniform requirements of their
own. In America school uniforms were considered characteristic of elite
public school schools. This was less true in Britain because the state
schools, first the grammar schools (academically selective secondary
schools), but eventually most other state schools were emuating the
public schools.
While Eton College did not conceive of the idea of school uniform in
England, the uniform it introduced in large measure initiated the modern
traditions of school uniforms in Britain. Eton College was one of
the many British schools which introduced
school uniforms in the mid-19th Century. The sober suit influenced
the uniform adopted by other schools as well as the clothes of British
boys of all classes. The resulting Eton suit, as it
is now known, became an emensely popular fashion for school age boys
both in
Britain and America. It is apparently the only public school uniform that
went on to become widely worn by boys--many of whom may never had heard
of Eton College. The Eton suit and collar was widely worn by boys in
the late 19th and early 20th Century.
It is unclear to the author why it was the Eton suit, and not the
uniforms at other public schools, that became such a standard of boyhood
fashion. Perhaps it was the prestige of Eton College. Even other public
schools adopted uniforms incorporating the destinctive Eton collar as well
as other features of the Eton suit.
Eton continues to have a strict dress code. One of the most
interesting aspects Eton is the school uniform. It is now made to
measure and laid out in a new boy's room when he arrives at school.
While many schools do well just to persuade their pupils not to turn up
wearing tennis shoes, at Eton the uniform requirements continues to be
strictly enforced--tailcoats, stiff collars and the famous Eton tie.
One new boy at Eton reports, "The uniform is quite weird at first, but then
you quickly learn that there is a special way of walking. You can't
really run at all, you have to learn to scuff your shoes along the floor
to get up any speed."
English boys in the early decades of the 19th Century began wearing short jackets which came to be known as Eton suits as the fashion was worn at Eton school. Entry requirements at Public schools (private boarding schools) varied greatly during the first half of the 19th Century. Some schools accepted quite young boys. These younger boys might arrive in Russian
Figure 3.--Eton suits were normally worn with long trousers. Some boys wore Eton collars with knee pant suits and long stockings. This Mary Mary Cassatt painting shows a standard Eton-style suit worn by a boy at mid-century. Click in the image for a larger image. |
The short Eton jacket was worn with a large stiff
white collar. The collar is one of the most destinguishabe features of
the Eton suit, but certainly looks uncomfortable. One correspondent
reports:
I was at a boot sale last summer. (Boot sales are an outdoor sale where people sell unwanted goods from their cars. I believe you Americans call them garage sales.) I happened upon some old Eton collars, plainly marked so on the inside. They were only size fourteen and a half but very wide and stiffly starched. I tried one about my neck and imagined what a penance it would be to have to wear all day and everyday - very irksome and confining.
Actually Eton School had two different uniforms. The uniform we
now think of with the stiff white collar and short jacket was the
junior uniform. Senior boys
wore long jackets with tails. Boys when they reached 5'4'' were
allowed to wear the senior uniform. But this meant that shorter boys
might have to wear the junior uniform even at 16 or 17. Finally in
19?? the school abolished the junior uniform and all boys now wear tails.
Eton boys would proudly wear their school uniform at public gatherings
such as Lords matches. It cklearly marked as an Etonian. In the 19th
and through the first half of the 20th Century there was no stigma in
Britain for flaunting one's social status. In fact it was considered the
correct thing to do.
The Eton collar proved so prestigious that it was incorporated into suits for all classes of boys. Many boys eventually worn Eton suits even though they did not go to the famed Eton School--many may not have even heard of the College. Reports from the late 19th and early 20th centuries often mention schools where the boys all wore Eton suits. Boys often wore the Eton collar with their best suit fr formal occasions. English boys
Figure 4.--British school boys normally wore Eton suits with long pants. As short pants became popular in the 1920s, younger boys at preparatory schools wore Eton suits with short pants and kneesocks. (Click on the image for information on preparatory schools.) Note the longish jacket this boy wears as well as the bowtie and a kind of jacket under his coat. |
After the First World War,
this style gradually began to disappear. For many years, many did not
believe a
boy poperly dressed with out the
collar. Many schools continued to require them well after the collars
had become generally unfashionable.
A spin off of the Eton suits became fasionable for small American boys beginning at about 5
Figure 5.--Collarless jackets appeared in the late 1920s and had become popular by the mid-1940s. They were marketed as Eton suits. At first they were worn with stiff Eton collars, but Peter Pan collars soon became more common. Apparently American mothers considered Eton collars somewhat severe for such little boys. Matching brother-sister outfits also were worn. |
Eton suits are still sometimes seen at formal weddings wear the ring bearer might be dressed in a blue or white Eton suit. Often white knee socks are worn at weddings, with both white and blue suits. The Eton suits worn in the 1950s,
Figure 6.--Some little American boys wore Eton suits until they were 7-8 years old before they got a suit with a more adult jacket. |
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