Or is it Tartan?

In looking through the fabulous vintage photos on the Swedish Roots website, one thing that caught my eye was the abundance of different plaids, mainly in women and children’s clothes. Of course, one of the first things I had to do was look up “plaids in Victorian/Edwardian times”, and I found this article, which I thought was very informative. I discovered that there is a difference between “plaid” and “tartan” patterns, (although I don’t mind telling you I still don’t quite “get it”). I also discovered that I’m not the first person to write a post about Victorian plaids.

The difference between this post and the others I found online is that here, we are mostly going to be looking at different outfits, with editorial comments by me, and not really learning about them. Also, even though I know they’re not the same, I find myself kind of merging “Victorian” with “Edwardian” in my mind. I also have a tendency to spell the latter as “Eduardian”, a direct result of having been a Spanish teacher for thirty years. (And then I can’t figure out why the spell check on my laptop underlines it in red!) Here is an article that briefly describes the difference between the two “eras”. Basically, the Victorian era was from 1837-1901, and Edwardian was from 1901-1910, but there is a lot more to it than that.

Some of these outfits, especially the younger girls’ dresses, look really uncomfortable to me.

I like the little beret on the left. You’ll also notice she is barefoot. However, I would like to know what the deal was with standing toddlers on chairs by themselves. The Swede in me says they could easily fall off!

The baby on the left doesn’t look like he/she is enjoying wearing plaid or being in a photo shoot. In those days, we know that boys under the age of about five to seven commonly wore dresses. For more information, here is an article I found on Wikipedia. The children on the right were noted on the Swedish Roots website as being “Elis and Walter, 1896”. The children in the center were identified as Lorens Malmgren (in the sailor suit), his brother Hilding and his sister Emma.

Here’s a good example from our family. The children are Hildur and Oscar Nelson, two of my Grandma Edla’s older siblings. Hildur unfortunately passed away at the age of about five. At one time, the photo on the left had been marked “Edla and Oscar Nelson”, but we now know the girl was Hildur, because Oscar was older than Edla. In the photo on the right, the kids look a little bit younger, and you can see again that Oscar is wearing a dress.

The girl on the left looks kind of sad to me, while the one on the right looks a bit apprehensive. In a future post, I’m planning to take a look at the different facial expressions I’ve found while going through these photos. You always read that people didn’t smile for photos back then (and a lot of them didn’t, for which they had their reasons), but I’ve found some great smiles and other emotions in some of these photos that surprised me, so they will probably surprise you, too.

Plaids and Pets. What more can I say?

These two photos just seemed like they should go together, if only for the way the subjects are standing.

You can tell a lot of thought went into these family portraits. On the left, it almost looks like the boy’s tie is made from leftover fabric from his sister’s dress. On the right, you can see that the girls are wearing identical dresses. I’m wondering of their mom made them.

Speaking of dressing little girls alike, these are pretty impressive. The one on the right is obviously not Victorian or Edwardian (Mid-Century Modern, perhaps?) but I couldn’t resist. (Truth in blogging: One of them is me, and one is my sister, in the early 60s. Can you guess which is which? Dresses courtesy of the Sears catalog.)

Some more identical plaid dresses. It looks like the boys and babies escaped wearing plaid like their sisters this time.

Amazingly, with all the plaid outfits I found on women and older girls, I have yet to find two that are identical. The exceptions were the photos of sisters posing together. While less commonly than with younger girls, they sometimes dressed alike for their photos. You would think that if “ready-to-wear” clothing was widely available, out of the thousands of photos you can see online, there would be duplicate outfits somewhere. I can only assume that a lot of clothing was specifically designed and/or made for the wearer, especially in the late 19th century. I found this on Wikipedia, if you want to read more.

I don’t think I’ve found a photo of a man wearing a plaid or checkered shirt yet. At that time, patterned fabric in shirts must not have caught on for men. However, here’s one of my unnamed, but “dapper” ancestors on the left wearing checkered pants, and an unknown man in Stockholm wearing striped ones. And I did find a checkered tie, so at least that’s something.

Lest you think all anyone wore in those days was plaid, there were also a lot of stripes and polka dots to be seen, which will have to be another post in themselves. Until then, I’ll be happy if I can just figure out the difference between plaid and tartan.