The Emergence of Modern Infantwear, 1896-1962: Traditional White Dresses Succumb to Fashion's Gender Obsession

Abstract

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a number of innovations and ambiguities in the clothing of young children. Dominant, popular period literature reveals mixed cultural sentiments regarding how children, and especially boys, should be dressed. Our analysis of this literature and of new clothing styles offered for the first five to six years of a child's life reveals that a larger re-visioning of gender and age boundaries was underway. Between 1896, the first year infantwear (the androgynous white dress) was offered in the Sears catalog in the United States, and 1962, the first year gender-specific wear for newborns appeared in the catalog, complex processes of visual negotiation and evolution occurred. "Revolutionary" changes in playwear and "interim" dressy garment innovations helped to bridge masculinity and femininity across the first years of life, hence easing the transition toward more modern, streamlined styles for boys, in particular. Integrating three fashion theories (Hollander's, McCracken's, and Kaiser, Nagasawa, and Hutton's), we interpret the changes in young children's clothing during this period as part of a complicated, evolutionary (male) "flight from femininity": one that required negotiating complex ambivalences and ambiguities in order to construct a binary system of modern, gendered infancy.

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