Figure 1.--This unidentified boy looks to be about 5-6 year old. wears a tunic suit cut to near knee levels. It has Scottish tartan trim at the shouldrs, pocket, sleve, cuff, waist, and skirt hem. The trim is also used on the bloomer knickers which seem to match the tunic, prhaps a little darker. They are wiork with white long stockings and high-top lace-up shoes. The stusio was Jolley's Gallery in Portage City, Wisconsin. This seems a rather fashionable outfit and the boy was not living in a large northeast city.

All American boys wore pants of some kind with tunics. Some tunics had trousers matching the tunics, others did not. Matching tunic suits were not very common in the 1850s, but in the 60s they were. We note Henry Jarvis wearing a checked tunic and plain pants. And we note J.? Bartlett, a San Franciso boy, wearing a plaid tunic and checked pants. The CDV portrait is undated, but looks like the 1860s to us. Suits with matching jackets and pants became much more common in the 1860s than the 50s. We believe that the same convention developed for tunics. Most tunic suits seem to have been made with bloomer knickers or long pants based on the photographic record. We also see knee pants. The bloomer knickers were worn with white long stockings. These knicker pants seem much less common with other outfits, especially for older boys. These pants seem much less common with other outfits. They were worn with both long pants and bloomer knicker pants which extended below the knee, often well below the knee. The bloomer knickers varied quite a bit. Some were cut vert full and long. Others were a more snug fit and cut tighter. Here we see no standard conventions. The bloomer knickers were often worn with white stockings in the 60s (figure 1). The age range for the bloomer knickers seems quite wide, but most seem to be pre-teens. We think long pants may have been the most common, but we are still asessing this as our archive expands.

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Created: 9:42 PM 1/7/2014
Last edited: 9:42 PM 1/7/2014