Quotes of interest

The Child in Fashion - By Doris Langley Moore


Pg11, 1-5
'It is a fact well know but none the less curious and surprising that the children of Western European Civilization were dressed until fairly late in the 18th Century exactly like miniature adults'


Pg11, 63-68 - Pg12, 1-3
'I have met several ladies who could remember being laced into the tight, boned dresses of their girlhood and two or three who as small as children, wore skirts of crinoline dimensions; and the impression left is always of 'feeling so very smart', or 'being so proud of my new clothes' and not of the restraint they must have inflicted.'


(Picture of Miss Lynn Redgrave)
Pg27, 3-7
'Only the youthful features of Miss Lynn Redgrave, and her simple style of hair dressing with a fringe on the forehead enable us to judge that this is the portrait of a little girl. The stiff bodice, tight narrow-shouldered back and hooped skirt are what her mother would have been wearing in the same epoch.'


1, 790 - Miss Chloe Sayer
Pg-33, 3-8
'The great sartorial innovation of the 18th century - a special dress for children'
'Girls as young as Miss Chloe Sayer might appear in these white frocks at a date when their elder sisters were still clad in hoops and buckram 'bodies' but it was not till the late seventeen-eighties that such extreme simplicity became fashionable for all children until near adolescence.'


Late eighteen forties
Pg49, 20-24
'Children's dresses however were now of decided colours, and not seldom, un-washable, and the fashion papers were beginning to introduce the figures of little girls and boys much oftener than formerly into their pages. The World of Fashion in 1844 was actually publishing an occasional plate with as many as eight children and no adult models at all.'


1855 Lady Selina Hastings
PG50, 1-8
'The idea, almost universal in the late 18th century, of simplifying children's clothing and freeing it from all irksomeness and constraint, had, by the middle of the 19th Century, been almost totally forgotten. No sooner had it been taken up bu those irrepressible characters, the wives of the lower bourgeoisie, than the upper ranks had grown restive.
Unwilling as always to brook any possibility of a confusion of identity, they had set their imitators at a distance by subtle changes, costly refinements; but they were never able to keep them from catching up at last, and by the date of our present example, they had reverted to that positive negation of fitness and utility which is openly a class distinction.'


1863 - Miss Camilla Hasse
Pg55, 4-6
'It is towards the eighteen-sixties that we first began to find fashions for the adolecent. This was at least partly due to the rise of periodicals aiming at middle class readers.'