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boys' dresses : national styles -- United States of America siblings brothers and sisters chronology
American Dresses: Brother and Sister Siblings--Chronology
Figure 1.--Here we see a girl and her little brother wearing coordinated, but not identical dresses. They look to be about 5 and 11 years old. The white outfits mke it difficult to make out much detail. Note the flowers. They may have been part of a wedding party. The boy's cap, however seems to be a strange choice. The embossed studio logo is difficult to read. It is something like Blackman in Wauszon, Ohio. The portrait is undated, but it is the new-styled cabinet card mount, probably taken about 1900-05.
Our chronological information on brothers and sisters wearing dresses is fairly limited. We know next to nothing on the 17th century. We believe it was fairly common for younger boys in the 18th centuryto wear dresses like their sisters, but have few images to support our assessment or to compare styling. We know much more about the 19th century, at least the second half of the century for which we have photographic images. Again we do not know much about the early-19th century. At the time it was very common for boys to wear dresses so we think this would have been quite common and that dresses for brothers and sisters were virtually interchangeable. We have, however, few images to assess the convention in detail. We know it was common in the second half of the 19th century and there are many photographic images which can be used to assess trends. The popular conventions began to decline notably in the 1890s and we see definite differences in the dresses chosen by mothers for sons and daughters, especially by the late-1890s. That said, it was all up to mother and we see some boys dressed just like theirsisters. We still see broithers and sisters wearing dresses in the very early-20th century. The unidentified brother and sister here is an example showingthe practice did continue into the 20th century (figure 1). We see relatively few briother-sister combinations wearing dresses in the 1910s and virtually none after World War I in the 1920s with the exception of infants.
