Figure 1.--Here we have a Canadian stair case snapshot, all wearing drsses. It looks like there is one boy in the mix. The photogrph is undated, but looks like the 1910s.

Canadian boys like boys in America and Europe wore dresses when they were young. It was a widely observed comnention for several centuries. We have no informtion on the 17th and 18th century, but note this convention in the 19th and early-20th century, primarily because of the photohraphic record. Only with the invention of photography can the trend be followed in any detail. As far as we can tell the pattern in Canada was similar to that of America and Britain, althouugh our Canadian archive is more limited and thus we can not follow developments in the same detail as Anerica and Britain. Basically the convention was fairly stanadard until the late-19th century. We think younger boys boys wore dresses in the first half of the 19th century. We are not sure how common tunics were at the time. After mid-century we begin to see some boys wearing kilt suits rather than dresses. We still some boys wearing dresses, such a the boy on the previous page, we think from the 1880s. Although this conventiion sems to have been notably declining by ythe in the 1890s, espoecially afterr mid-decade. We think Little Lord Fauntleroy suits were a factor. Dresses were much less common in the 1900s. After World War I in the 1920s the convention of dresses for boys were a rarity. We have so far only found a few pertinent portraits to substaiate this genreal pattern. We still see the sone bouys wearing dresses in the earl-20th century, but far fewer and younger boys than in the 19th century

Created: 11:45 PM 10/25/2007
Last updated: 12:51 AM 8/5/2008