Figure 1.--This American boy in a classic sailor suit wears ringlet curls. He looks to be about 8 or 9 years old. The boy is identified as "Lonnie L. Dennis. Baby Preacher."
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Figure 1.--This American boy in a classic sailor suit wears ringlet curls. He looks to be about 8 or 9 years old. The boy is identified as "Lonnie L. Dennis. Baby Preacher." |
American boys wore their sailor suits during the late 19th century with many different hair styles. Because the sailor suit was so popular, it was worn with a wide variety of hair styles. As sailor suits were worn by boys from about 5 to 12 for several decades, their hair styles might vary from long ringlet curls to cloes-cropped hair. Boys wore just about every different hair styles with sailor suits. Hair styles are a little complicated and there can be overlasos, such as cropped hair or ringlet curls with bangs.
A very popular hair style for children, both boys and girls were bangs. We see many American boys wearing their sailor suits with a bangs hair cut. This often was a style for the younger boys wearing sailor suits, but this varied somewhat over time. We also note different styles of cuttng the bangs. We seem to find more examples of boys wearing sailor suits with bangs after the 20th centuty.
We notice some American boys with cropped hair wearing sailor suits in the late-19th century. We note different legths here. Some cropped styles were just long enough to cut bangs. This hair style does not seem to have been nearly as common in America as it was in Europe, but we do see a number of such examples.
Some of the boys wearing sailor suits had ringlet curls which became especially popular in the 1880s as part of the Fauntleroy craze. The boys with long hair were a minority, but this of course varied with age. Quite a few bpys at 5 or 6 might still have their curls. By 10 most, but not all boys had their curls cut. The fact that many boys wore ringlet curls with sailor suits is primarily a function of how common the sailor suit was rather than an assciation between tinglets and the sailor duit--as was the case for the Fauntlerou suit.
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