Figure 1.--Knee pants were at first worn well below the knees, commonly at calf level. We begin to see boys by the late-1880s and early 90s actually wearing actual knee-length knee pants. This American boy probably in the 189os wears knee pants actually cut at knee level. The studio was Ayer in Augusta, Maine.

Although the term "knee pants" was very commonly used it can be misleading. Many of these pants were not actually knee length. In fact we see knee pants being worn at many different lengths from above the knee to just a little above the ankle. For purposes of assessment, we have divided knee pants into three basic lengths: 1) knee length, 2) calf length, and 3) near ankel length. The popularity of the different lengths seems primarily a function of the chronology of knee pants. Age seems to have little to do with it, except a growing boy would wear knee pants that looked shorter thn when he first got them. Early knee pants seem quite long, A good example is a portrait of two unidentified brothers wearing very-long cut knee pants in 1864. Most were cut at calf level. As late as the mid-1880s, we still see the near ankle-length knee pants. A good example is Jesse Bell, an American boy in 1884. By the 1890s knee pants were actually cut at knee level.