Figure 1.--This is a CDV of a 7 year old French boy with a serious expression. He is wearing a belted tunic with a scarf at his neck. The CDV is undated. We might guess it was taken in the 1870s, but are not sure. The Photographer was Alfred Le Boucher of 9 Rue St. Simon, Paris. I think that the sitter's name is M. Chenu Impasse L'Oiseau, but I am not sure. That name is written on the back along with Rivieres St. Jacques. Click on the image to see the back. Perhaps you can better intepret the writing.
We believe that tunics were more widely worn as school grments in Europe than americ. We have quite a substantial archive of merican photograph, beginning in the 1840s with Daguerreotypes. But we see very few boys wearing tunic suits. We do see tunic outfits in the 1860s and 70s. We believe some boys may have worn them to school. but this is difficult to tell because school photography did not begin to become a popular undertaking until the 1880s. We see a lot of portraits of younger American children wearing tunics in the early-20th century, but very few wearing them to school. The pattern appears to have been different in Europe, althouhggh our archive is more limited and European photographs before the appearance of the CDV (1860s) are not nearly as common as in America. We do see quite a number of European boys wearing tunics as school wear in the 1860s. This suggets to us that the tunic was a common school garment in the early- and mid 1860s. Quite a few of our images come from England, but we believe tht boys in France and Germny also wore tunics to school. Here we have smaller 19th century archives which may explain why we have fwer tunic school images. Here we see a French boy, we think about 1870 (figure 1). Most of the portraits we have found suggest that the tunic was mostly worn by middle-class boys. The French image here looks sokewhat like a working-class boy with his scarf rather than a bow or tie.
We hope to persue this as HBC expands. We do see tunics in Eastern and Centrl Europe, but we are not sure how common they werebecause our archive is so limited for these countries during the late-19 century. The Russian peasant dress, essentially tunics, were the inspiration for the Russian blouse tunics commonly worn in Western Europe and America during the early-20th century.
