Family Hair Styles: No Clothing Coordination and No Hair Coordination


Figure 1.--The American children are both dressed differently and their hair styled differently without any attemp at coordination. The image is undated, but we would guess about 1905.

Some mothers made no effort to coordinate either the clothes or the hair styles for their children. Here some judgement needs to be used in assessing the images. This is because the age of the children detrmine, in part, how they were dressed--sort of an automatic coordination. What we mean by coordination is some sort of stylistic relationship and not, for example, that the boys all wear kneepants or the girls wear dresses. Some garments like black long stockings were so common in America that they can hardly be called coordinated clothing. In the early 19th century the absence of ready-made clothing complicated clothing coordination, but it was very common in many families--especially among like gender children. Even so large numbers of portraits show no attempt at clothes coordination. After World War I it became increasingly less common to style brothers and sisters hair, although occassionaly the mother might coordinate the clothing of younger brothers and sisters. Coordinating the clothing and hair styles of like gender siblings was much more common, but increasingly mothers dressed the even like gender children differently. Brothers mught be more likely to have similar hair styles in part because there were more different ways od styling girls' hair. Mother might have the boys' hair cutvshort for the summer, more as a convenience than an attempt to coordinate the style. Of course as the children got older thaere was almost always a greater tendency to let the children adopt their own preferences increasingly the liklihood that hair styles would not be identical or even coordinated.










Christopher Wagner






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Created: November 7, 2002
Last updated: November 7, 2002