Figure 1.--This unidentified boy wears a tunic suit with frilled pantalletts. He looks to be about years old. The CDV portrait has no studio information, is unidentified, but we think it may be Canadian. It looks to have beeb taken in the 1860s.

We have noted boys in the early 19th century wearing pantalettes with their tunics. Commonly this was the younger boys that had just been breeched, but some older boys also wore pantalettes as well. We have noted boys wearing pantalettes with tunics as late as the late-1850s. Until the 1860s younger boys might commonly wear a tunic with lacey pantalettes. Tunics for little boys even at mid-century provided many opprtunities for a doting mother to fuss over her son. Small boys between 3 and 6 might wear tunics with white drawers showing below the hem, deopending on the period, often well below the hem. Sometimes the pantalettes were decorated with lace and ruffles. Others were more plain, but still in lighter material than the tunic and usually white. Girls and sometimes boys wore these long lace trimmed pantalletes (drawers). A good example is a painting of an English boy in an idealized Victorian family being cared for by a governess in the early-1850s. We also notice two Hungarian boys about the same time. We also notice examples in the late-1860s and early-70s.

Created: 3:16 AM 2/17/2022
Last updated: 3:16 AM 2/17/2022