Figure 1.--This Russian cabinet card portrait shows an unidentified boy with a rather formidable-looking mother. The photo is 13x10 сm. The boys wears a sailor suit. Notice the non-traditional collar. It is a square collar with a V-interior. We are not sure how to date it. The dealer suggested the 1900s. We think it might be earlier. Notice the boy's knee pants. Thestripes at the knee hem look more like an 1870s style. The length is, however, the shorter length we see in the 1890s and 1900s. The studio set looks like the 70s.
Sailor suits included headwear, jackets or middy blouses, and matching pants. There were also coats such as reefer coats. There were a range of accessories, including dickeys, lanyards, buttons and other items.
The boy on the previous page wears a standard middy blouse with traditional styling. Here we see a boy with a non-traditional sailor collar (figure 1). This was not very common, but we do see some examples. One destinctive feature of many Russian sailor suits was the horizontally stripped dickey. I'm not sure what kind of garment this was, but I think it was lkike a "T"-shirt. Not all Russian boys had these stripped dickeys, but they were very common, in part because this was a common feature of the sailor suits chosen by the royal family.
