Figure 1.--Here we see the suspenders that Joe wore in a scene at home. The home looks a bit affluent for a family of modest means. Notice the grey shirt.
|
Figure 1.--Here we see the suspenders that Joe wore in a scene at home. The home looks a bit affluent for a family of modest means. Notice the grey shirt. |
Joe wore suspenders to keep his pants up. In the birthday scene Joe can be seen wearing suspenders, which he would have called braces. They look to be thick leather ones. Joe does not seem to have had a belt. Although in one scene he is shown riding his bike with a young Elizabeth Taylor and he is not wearing his suspenders. So he must have had a belt as well. I think this is reasonably accurate. Suspenbders were quite common. I'm not so sure how common belts were. We suspect that by the 1930s boys were increasingly wearing belts, but Yorkshire was rther a conservative area of England so suspenders may have persisted there longer. A reader writes, "I recall that they were very common among undergraduates when I was at Oxford in 1951-53, especially worn with suits but also sometimes with slacks and tweed jackets. They were obligatory of course with formal clothes such as dinner jackets and tails. And some of the choir
boys at Christ Church and New College (these colleges had boy choirs) wore braces with their short pants--but not very many. The boys mostly wore belts, but one did see braces also. What one NEVER saw was boys wearing both suspenders and a belt. It was always one or the other. The Brits even today use the expression, "belt and braces," to refer to an argument or procedure that is tautological--i.e., one that uses two proofs or demonstrations where
one would suffice."
Navigate the Boys' Historical Clothing Web Site:
[Return to the Main "Lassie Come Home" costuming page]
[Introduction]
[Activities]
[Biographies]
[Chronology]
[Clothing styles]
[Countries]
[Theatricals]
[Bibliographies]
[Contributions]
[FAQs]
[Glossaries]
[Satellite sites]
[Tools]
[Boys' Clothing Home]