Argentine Juvenile Suits: The Sailor Suit


Figure 1.-- These unidentified Argentine children wer probably photographed around 1910, based on the clothes and cabinet mount style. The boy wears a white sailor outfit without a dickey. If the cabinet card did not have a studio imprint, we would have thought the children were German. The sailor suit is a clasic German suit down to the white string tie and the way the scarve is done, although it is a little different thn a Germsn suit. His little sister wears pleated dress. The boy has his hair done in bangs and his sister has a short cut. The artistic cabinet cardboard photo is definitelt chracteristic of the early-20th century. The photo measures: 3.93 inches wide by 5.51 inches high. The cardboard mount measures: 6.88 inches wide by 10.03 inches high. The studio was P. Apugliese in Buenos Aires.

Argentine boys were a variety of popular European styles. As in Europe, sailor suits were popular in Argentina. Not only was their a fashion influence, but large numbers of of Europeans, especially Italians, emigrated to Argentina. The most common style of juvenile suit was of course the sailor suit. Sailor suits were one of the most popular and long-lasting boys' styles and we see then in Argentina as well. This was the case throughout the Western World. It began in Britain and was most popular on the Continent, but was widely worn in North America. We also see it in Latin America, although was less common because of the region's small middle class. The sailor suit was probbly more common in Argentina than in other Latin American country. This was largely because of the substantial economic success of Argentina in the late-19th and early-20th century and substantial growth of the middle class. Many economists believe that Argentina was on the verge of making the transition from a developing to a developed economy. The sailor suit is a style strongly associated wuth European royal families and more importantly the middle class which tended to follow royal fashion leads. And we see large numbers of Argentine boys wearing sailor suits in the late-19th and early-20th century. We notice an unidentified Italian-Argentine boy in 1893. This is paently clear in the photgraphic record. We see a range of styles in part due to the styles popular with important immigrant groups. We see German styles, for example, in Argentina, one of the few countries outside of Germany where we see these styles. Presumably the boys involved were from immigrant families. We do not think the German styles were widely worn by non-German Argentine boys. Tragically the disaterous policies pursued by Argentine Governments and supported by the powerful trade union leaders ended the trajectory of development, primarily by undercutting property rights and the rule of law and enacting socialist entitlemet programs that the developing economy could not sustain. As in other countriues, the popularity of sailor suit began to decline in the 1930s.









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Created: 3:05 AM 7/12/2007
Last updated: 12:46 AM 10/21/2016