American Kilt Suit Styles: Sailor Styling--Prevalence
Figure 1.--This CDV portrait shows an unidentified boy with his mother and probably a daughter. Notice the wasp waists. Whale-bone corsets and these waists were popular (1870s-80s). The boy loks tonbe avoutb4-years old. He is weaing a sailor kilt suit with a wide-brimmed hat. Notice the petticoat. The portrait is also undated, but we woulld guess it was taken abiut 1880. All wee know for sure is tht it was taken by S. Fichtel (we re not positive about the 'F') in Hoboken, New Jersey. Clkick on the image for a fuller discussion.
We notice quite a few sailor-styled kilt suits in the photographic record. The sailor suit was most popular for school-age boys, but the kilt suit was mostly for pre-school boys. And primarily miuddle-class families. They were much less common for wirking-class families, but of course working=class familes were less likely to have portraits taken. This is not to say that wirking-class families did not have portraits made. American workers were the best paid in the world. And they could foird portrairs, but for them it was a splurge, unlike middke-class portraits for which the cost of a portrait was not iof any significance. Sailor kilts were a way of usung the popular sailor style for younger boys. We see numerous sailor-styled kilt suits in the photographic record. It was not the most common style of kilt suit, but we see quite a number. It is a little difficult to quantify the number. The most common style was the suit jacket style, but we would estimate that something like 5 percent of the kilt suits were sailor-style kilt suits. That may seem like a small number, but there were mabt different styles of kilt syits, so it is not an unimportsnt number. This is based on the sailor kilt images we hve archived on HBC. And we see not reason why our archive is not representative of overall kilt suit trends. And we point out that we have only posted a fraction of our archive on HBC pages. And we see many more of these sailor kilt suits than sailor dresses--at least sailor dresses for boiys. We are not entirely sure why, but suspect it was because the kilt suit was beginning to be seen as more appropriate for boys than dresses in the popular mind by the time kilt suit had become an important style for boys.
