*** English boys clothes : garments selection approaches

English Boys' Garments: Selection Approaches--Age Grading

Figure 1.--This CDV shows an unidentified father and his two sons. The portrait is undated, but looks like the late-1860s. The boys look to be about 4-7 years old. The younger boy wears a cut-away jacket weith either a long dress or tunic. It is a little difficult to make out what his big brother is wering, but it looks like collasr-buttoning suit. We can make out a Peter Pan collar. (The mame would not appear until much later.) The studio was Hertz & Co in Bradford (Yorkshire), a northern industrial city.

One approach was to select the garment in relationship to the age of the child. This is called age grading. Here the children in the family have their clothes determined by their ages. The boys on the previous page are a good example. As they grow older major changes are made in their clothing such as braeching. Hair styles were also age graded. Other steps might be more modest suh as changing the accessories worn rather than the garment. A younger boy might wear a large bow, but after a year or two the size of the bow or the type of collar might be changed while the boy continued to wear the same suit. The pratice of age greading apopears to have begun in the early Victorian era or just before it and continued through the Edwardian era and World War I. Age grading is most obvious for boys' clothing, but therewas also age grading fr girls. It was, however, more more subtle for the girls. Of course this all change over time as different styles came and went. Tracking all of this can be somewaht complicated as so few of these old portraits specify the age of the children. For the most part we have to estimate the ages of the children. While not ideal, we can estimate the ages well enough to get a good idea of the age grading process involved.

HBC

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Created: 9:54 PM 4/17/2026
Last updated: 9:54 PM 4/17/2026