Figure 1-- This unidentified boy wears a fancy, huge collar. Parts looks to be done as eyelet lace. Flopy bows were common with ruffled collars or large eyelet lave collars, they were less common with pure lace ciollars. The cabinet portrait was taken at the J.O. Tucker studio in San Jose, California. The portrait is undated, but the mount style suggests the turn-of-the 20th century, probably 1900-05.

We contunue to see some lace collars in the 20th century, but only the very early-20th century. Most of the examples we have found come from the 1900s, especially the early part of the decade. A good example is Ivan Eugene Perry in 1906-07. Ivan wears a lace collar with a tunic suit, but without a floppy bow. Ruffled collars were much more common before large fancy collars began to decline in popularity in the late 1900s and 1910s. Some ruffled collars had lace mixed into them. A good bit of the lace we see is cut-out lace rather than the more expensive true lace. After the 1900s, lace collars along with Fauntleroy styling in general rapidly fell out of style for boys. We suspect that not only did boys did not like them, but some of the boys who had worn such outfit in the 1880s and 90s were now becoming young fathers. We have no images after World War I of boys, even toddlers, wearing lace collars. We continue to see some younger boys with large collars, often Eton or Peter Pan collars, but not lace collars.

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Created: 10:10 PM 4/5/2010
Last updated: 6:02 PM 10/3/2013