An exhibition of children’s clothes is rare in the world of fashion curation. Clothing—as with all material culture of childhood—is often recycled or adapted, and rarely survives in good enough condition to display in museums. When we do see kids’ clothes, they are likely to be presented as material records of social history rather than be given the glamorous attention of couture or elevated to high fashion.
It is for this reason that the London Fashion & Textile Museum ode to boy’s clothing “Oh Boy!” was so welcome. Curated by fashion historians Amy de la Haye and Alasdair Peebles, and featuring objects from Peebles’ own remarkable collection, “Oh Boy!” comprised two displays running in sequence that the curators described as Act 1 (September 29–December 16, 2023) and Act 2 (December 21, 2023–March 3, 2024). Each act showcased a different trend in boys’ fashion, managing to pack a lot of objects and ideas into just a couple of display cases. Like the clothes themselves, “Oh Boy!” was small but well formed.
Act 1, Breeched: No More Dresses, explored “the ceremony of entry to the masculine world” experienced by boys of Georgian England. For their first few years, boys wore dresses and petticoats similar to their sisters. Around the age of six, boys would shed their dresses and begin wearing breeches and trousers—often in the form of a skeleton suit of matching trousers and waistcoat, worn with a short jacket.
The story of breeching was a strong choice for the opening act. To the uninitiated viewer, the historical jolt of seeing boys in dresses opened up space to question assumptions of gendered dressing. Breeching also highlighted how childhood is divided into thresholds of age, and the role of rites and customs of dress in marking these transitions. Through memories of learning to tie our shoelaces, negotiating hand-me-downs, and putting on new school uniform, we can all understand how clothes shape our journey to adulthood.
The display was also of interest to historians of childhood for drawing out the subtleties that distinguished young boys’ and girl’s gowns. Academic histories of children’s dress often state that very young children wore the same clothes, but in his commentary, Peebles explained how details differed in boys’ and girls’ gowns: “I knew the decorative buttons and cross-lacing on the bodice [of this dimity gown – pictured above] signified that it was certainly worn by a boy.” This caption demonstrated the depth of understanding that comes from true expertise, and drew me in to look closer at the fine details.
Act 2, titled Ship Shape, moved from breeching to “the enduring vogue for nautical styles” in boys’ dress from about 1860 to 1930. If the first act was about change at the levels of individual and culture, the second reinforced continuity, in the form of the ubiquitous sailor suit, with its familiar square collar, gold buttons and jaunty ribbons.
The display started with a tiny pair of dark leather shoes with square toes and fairy-fine stitching sat in their own display case. They are reputed to be the shoes worn by Bertie (the future King Edward VII), with the sailor suit that his mother Queen Victoria commissioned in 1846 on board the Royal Yacht. The charming suit, and the associated portrait, launched a thousand imitators and set the course of boys’ fashion for a century after.
The second outfit in the exhibition, a small linen sailor suit, also introduced an origin story: it was the first significant purchase that began Peebles’s collection. Nearby hung a picture of Peebles as a boy in the 1970s, when his passion for dressing up in historical uniform began. It was refreshing to see the curator-collector as a character in the exhibition, not only because it promoted transparency around provenance of the objects on view, but also because it acknowledged the positionality of the curator and the contingency of the historical record.
Five of the outfits in Ship Shape’s theatrical display were accessorised for the seaside, with a bucket and spade, seashells, and crab net. Three others stood in a paneled drawing room, topped with Tam O’Shanters (a Highland bonnet popularized by poet Robert Burns). These changing backdrops suggested how the sailor suit survived for so long: it was the ultimate day-to-night outfit. Made in linen the sailor suit worked for playtime, and in velvet, it suited a page boy.
The costumes in this show were beautifully mounted on mannequins that appeared to hover off the ground; the shirts were artfully ruched, and the ribbons had a lively bounce, like the boys we imagine wore them. The intention of these clothes was to charm adult eyes, and they do to this day. While I appreciated that the show took boys’ clothes seriously as couture, I wanted to see more of the threads connecting these items of clothing to the cultural contexts that created them. In particular, what these clothes might reveal about attitudes to children and ideas of childhood.
There is much more to be explored about breeching, and the historical ideas of gender and age that it reveals. I was left wondering how breeching resonated with the Lockean idea of children as ‘blank slates’ which dominated pedagogical discourse of the eighteenth century. The non-gendered clothing of young children seems to bolster this view that humans are born ‘unformed’, yet on the other hand, breeched boys symbolically assumed masculinity through the external application of clothing, dictated by social customs rather than personal experience. Was there conflict between these two ideologies? Did the developing educational establishment challenge sartorial rites of passage? I would love to know more.
In the second act, my thoughts were preoccupied with the militarism and romance woven in to the sailor suit. These clothes dated from the peak years of the British Empire, forged through naval warfare and maritime trade. The sailor suit domesticated expansive capitalism by miniaturizing it into a playful parlor pastiche. At the same time, it reinforced the aspiration of seafaring for young boys and promoted masculinity based on Empire. The suit’s appeal was not limited to the upper classes. An array of cartes de visites photographs showed real boys dressed in the nautical style—some more precisely and expensively than others, and against a whole range of discordant backdrops in photographers’ studios across Britain; this was a wonderful reminder how high fashion disperses into messy reality.
As evidenced by the big questions that the exhibit raised, “Oh Boy!” was a thoughtful and engaging display of rarely seen childrenswear with a clear curatorial voice. I was inspired to think deeply about the distinctiveness of children’s dress, and the value of studying it apart from adult clothing. I anticipate we will see more of Peebles’s collection, and hope that it be displayed as buoyantly and beautifully as it was here.
Alice Sage is co-editor of Digital Childhoods. She’s interested in children’s clothes, fancy dress, and the crossover between the two.
