Figure 1.--This cabinet card portrait shows an unidentified boy wearing a knee pants cut-away jacket suit wuth frogging elements. The poortrait is undated, but looks like the 1890s. He has a detachable collar. We think he is wearing a shirtwaist. Notice that it is very plain and there are no front buttons. The studio was Palmer in Buffalo, New York.

We do not yet know much about the shirts and blouses worn with cut-away jackets. This is in part because many early-cut way jackets were worn with vests. Thus all you can see was the collar. When the cut-away jacket first appeared (1850s), collars could be very small and got even smaller (1860s) before growing unto enormous sizes (1890s). These small collars we believe were attached and as they were often detachable collars, that tells you nothing about the blouse or shirt. In fact they were often worn with shirt waists. This we are not entirely sure about. We often do not see much of the shirts and blouses. When the jackets were no sharply cut away and buttones and a vest was worn, we just do not get to see much of the shirt-like garment. The Indiana boy on the previous page is a good example, we can even tell much about the collar other than it was small. But as the cut-away area got wider and vests become less commomn, we begin to learn more. Actually we are not entirely sure about the seasonality of vests. Button-on blouses were very common. Some blouses and shirts had button front closures. In many we can not see the buttons. A portrait of Elmer Dayton in 1870 clearly show the waist button-on buttons as well as the front shirt buttons. These jackets began to decline in popularity during the 1880s. We are still working on the shirt-like garments during the early-80s. Here we see an unidentified New York boys with a very plsinj dhiort-like gsrment, we think a shirtwaist (figure 1). An exception of course was the explosion of popularity of dancy blouses, part of the Fauntleroy craze. The cut-away feature was perfect for showing off the fancy Fauntleroy blouse to best affect.

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Created: 11:33 PM 11/8/2018
Last updated: 11:33 PM 11/8/2018