Figure 1.--This family snapshot shows three children at the beach enjoying an ice cream cone. It is dated Mat 22, 1921. Two of the children are obviously girls and two or boys. We are not sure about the child in the middle. Three of the boys wear sailor outfits. The two boys on the right wear summer sailor suits that look brnd new. They are done with short pants, but notice they are the same length as knee pants.

Sailor suits were worn with a variety of pants. This depended in part on the general popularity of the dufferent kinds of pants rather than the associaion with sailor suits. Knickers were standard in the 1920s., but for some reason somewhat less so with sailor suits. Perhaps it was because shorts were becomniong associated with the younger boys for which saolor suit were most common. Short pants appeared in the early-20th century, but did not become commonly worn until the 1920s after World War I. We see some boys wearing knee pants which had basically gone out of style in the 1910s, but we see some younger boys still wearing them. Knee pants were going out of style, but several suits came with knee pants (notice the buttons at the hem) rather than shorts. An example is Ross Lockridge Jr. in 1922. I though that dressy suits might be more likely to have knee pants, but I can discern so consitent theme as to whether certain suits had short pants or knee pants. By the mid-1920s shorts had entirely replaced knee pants. Most sailor suits, especially white summer suits were worn with shorts. We note E McKenzie wearing a traitional sailor suit with short pants during 1923. We also see long pants for boys. The long pants suits seem to be primarily for dressing up. Play suits were less comminkly done with long pnts. We notice mostly knee pants in the 1921 Altman catalog. The one suit that does (S74) have long pant also has a pair of shorts. One wonders who decided which pair of trousers was worn for what occassions. The longs were bell bottoms with laced strings in the back. I can't tell if the trousers to these suits have pockets. The button-on style trousers do not appear to have the pockets, but other 1920s styles did. The middy blouses for the other suits cover part of the trouser, so it is difficult to tell. But again other 1920s styles did, so these sailor suit trousers probably did also.

Created: 2:04 AM 11/6/2018
Last updated: 2:04 AM 11/6/2018