Figure 1.--This portrait is unidentified, but the writing on the back is Dutch, so presumably the boy is Dutch. A Dutch reader tells us, however, that "Somehow the bicycle does not look Dutch to me." The photograph looks to have been taken in the late-1920s or early 30s. Most of our Dutch archive shows boys wearing kneesocks, but here we see that long stockings were also worn. We thought that the long stockings may have been seen as more formal, it clearly is not cold out. But the lack of a tie and bike suggest a rather informal scene. Click on the image for a fuller discussion provided by a HNC reader.

An American reader commenting on this snapshot writes, "It reminded me a bit of the way I dressed when I was about 11 or 12 in the Northeastern U.S. except for the somewhat different style of the short pants suit and the color of the long stockings. Mine were beige or tan rather than black. But the length of the shorts is about the same as what I wore at the same age. Notice that the stockings are fairly light weight (probably of cotton) and trimly supported, which makes me think the photo is probably late 1930s rather than earlier. Your Dutch contributor says that by the 1930s long stockings were worn in the Netherlands only by the sons of farmers rather than by more urban boys. I'm sure this is basically right, but I wonder whether there were not certain exceptions. This boy with his bike doesn't look much like a farmer's son. He seems more suburban and middle-class, maybe even upper middle-class. And since the season is obviously not fall or winter, he doesn't wear long stockings merely for warmth. He looks almost as if he were dressed for school, perhaps riding his bike to and from his school. HBC has another photo of a Dutch family in which a teenage boy is wearing a short trousers suit with long black stockings--a photo which also looks as though the family involved were middle-class or even upper middle-class but hardly rural, although it is difficult to be sure. I suspect that a few Dutch conservative families still insisted on long stockings for boys in the 10 to 14 year-old range during the 1930s and that these examples represent this minority. I agree that class implications are involved, and that some families were simply more traditional about the propriety of having boys' knee covered. Note also the 1949 photo, apparently commercial in origin, that shows a younger Dutch boy wearing long stockings with a winter outfit. Maybe the proximity to Germany, where long stockings were much more common in the 1930s and 1940s, is significant.

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Created: 3:48 PM 11/1/2006
Last updated: 12:39 AM 10/24/2008