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The 64 photographs in the album are mostly of children, primarily at school. There are also photographs of children at home, in youth groups, and with friends. Thus there are many images of the clothes children wore during the period, providing useful insights on how contemportary children of various ages dressed. This can be see on the various pages we have created, but there are several images that offer useful insights on various garments and styles. Here we have enlarged portions of the photographs to bring out some interesting points.
We see one little tike in the album. He is about 1 year old and well bundled up for cold weather (figure 1). He is one of the few boys wearing a cap in the album. It is a ski cap with a large pom. He appears to be wearing some kind of knit shirt over a banded sweater, short pants, and ribbed long stockings. Mom was taking no cgance that he would get a cold. He has a tight grip on his ball and not at all sure about the photographer.
Very few boys wear caps in the photographs. In fact the only caps we see are in one undated photographs, but clearly from the 1920s. It is a class photograph. Quite a few of the boys wear sailor suits and peaked military caps--a popular school cap style. Other than here there are virtually no caps. Even the boys in the youth group do not wear caps.
Sailor suits were a particularly popular style in Germany. Sailor suits seem very common in the primary school photograpghs. About half the class wore sailor suits in the undated photograph. And there are several boys wearing sailor suits in both the 1928 and 1929 photographs. While sailor suits were common in the primary school, they seem much less common in the secondary shool. Even in the secondary school, some boys wore sailor suits. We note a boy about 12 or 13 years old in a group watching athletic competitions.
Boys commonly wore suits to school in the erly 20th century. This was particulrly common at secondary schools. It continued to be the ase in the 1920s and even in the 1930s. By the 1930s, howver, we begin to see more younger secondary students dressing somewhat informally. We note several noys in the school photographs wearing sweaters to school rather than suits. We notice many different styles of sweaters. Some wee almost certainly hand knitted at home.
The boys in the album wore different kinds of pants. The boys in primary school wore short pants. Some boys may have worn knee pants, but this is difficult to tell in the class group photograsphs. The sutuation at the secondary school is more divrse. We still see many boys wearing short pants. This seems to have been the most common choice, especially for the younger secondary boys. Many of the older boys wear knickers and a few long pants. The knickers many boys wore seem quite long, down to the calves. One is reminded of the Belgian cartoon character Tintin. There was no school rule here. The choice was up the boys and their parents.
Most of the boys pictured in the album wear kneesocks. Exceptr for the althletic competitions the boys do not wear anle socks. Some boys wear long stockings. This was the case both in the primary and secondary school photographs. The close up photographs of the boys mostly show them wearing knee socks or long stockings rolled down to look like kneesocks. The group photographs show quite a few boys wearing long stockings, mostly blight-brown or perhaps grey shades. Earlier black long stockings would have been common, but by the 30s, black long stockings were mostly worn for formal occassions.
One of the photographs provides an interesting detail illustrating the kind of hose supporters for long stockings that German boys wore in 1929. In most cases our photos of boys wearing long stockings in Germany show no gap between the stocking tops and the hem of the short trousers so that we have to guess about the nature of the garters worn. But this enlargement clearly shows that in some cases German boys wore supporters with metal clips rather than the more common
garter strips with button holes for attaching to white buttons sewn onto the stocking tops.
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