Figure 1.--This cabinet card shows an unidebtified boy wearing a white blouse with a pleated velvet skirt. We suspect this was part of a kilt suit, but are not sure. The portrait might have been taken during the summer. It is not sated, but looks like the 1880s to us, perhaps just before the Fauntleroy era. The studio was Burkholder in Mt. Vernon, Ohio. A reader tells us, "I know Mt. Vernon Ohio. It is the closest large settlement to Kenyon College and by the 1880s Kenyon had been in existence for about 60 years so it was probably pretty prosperous."

We see skirts throuhghout the late-19th century. We continue to see boys wearing skirts in the 1880s. A good example is an unidentified Ohio boy we think in the 1880s (figure 1). He wears a white blouse with a pleated velvet skirt. We believe that there was probably a jacket that went with it. We are unsure if mother would have chosen velvet for a skirt tht was sn as basiclly a casual garment. Another good example is George Knapp in 1887, but like many such examples we are left with the impession that this was part of a kilt suit rather than a stand-alone suit. We suspect that in warm summer weather, younger boys were allowed to wear shirt sleeves without a jacket even when dressing up. We continue to see lot of kilt suit. Actual kilt were not worn with these slits. Some had kilt features, often they were simply basic skirts. Thus boys had skirts abailable to wear. As far the portraits we have found seem to be mostly these skirts rather than a skirt mother may have bought or made. These may have been been nore common than suggested by the ample photographic record because wanted children dressed up in their best clothes for a portrait. Motably we see many of these images during the decades that likt suits were most popular which woild mean the 1870s and 80s.

Created: 5:57 PM 8/7/2017
Last updated: 5:57 PM 8/7/2017