From the Cradle to the Best-Dressed List and Back
Note: Introduction missing
… company, installed themselves at the Plaza Hotel and called up
buyers and fashion editors. They came, looked at the clothes, which
were to sell from $10 to $35 in sizes 3 to 6x, approved of Mrs. Lent's
theories, placed orders and wrote feature stories.
"Everything has been Eton or terribly appliqued, and no color," said
Mrs. Lent, listing what was wrong with boys' clothes. "Little boys are
all bones and beautiful little necks. They should have clean lines
and nice colors, without looking like little girls, of course. I also
love white on little boys." But don't little boys have an affinity for
dirt?" someone asked. "I change my son two times a day. I want him to
have pride in himself," Mrs. Lent replied.
She took the Eton jacket and made it into a cutaway. "It's an
18th-century look," she said. She did away with collars and sleeve
buttons. Short pants buttoned onto shirts instead of being held up
with straps. "They're always falling and driving little boys crazy,"
she said. She also omitted the fly from the pants, seemingly unconcerned
about what this would do to a newly toilet-trained size 3.
Nevertheless, Rachel Lent struck a responsive chord in the fashion
industry. Said Women's Wear Daily on September 19, 1966:
Two months later, Women's Wear reported again on Rachel Lent:
Until recently, little boys had been the last of the free souls.
They were let alone between the time they graduated from diapers
they felt compelled to become teen-age pests. No one bothered about
their fashion quotient. Then jealous mothers, whose friends were
having such fun coordinating themselves to their daughters, started
lobbying. Designers heard them. Now they and wishful writers like
those who work for Women's Wear Daily refuse to believe that boys are
made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails. As far as they and
other progressive elements in the fashion industry are concerned,
boys are coordinated sugar and spice. They can be coordinated to their
mothers, sisters or their fathers. "Dressed like twin brothers, a
father and a son," reads a caption in L'Express, the French weekly
news magazine, beside a photograph of a three-foot pygmy with
sideburns descending to the bottom of his earlobes, his hands jammed
into the pockets of his tweed trousers. "We've already had the
mother-daughter look. Thanks to the lightning progress of baby
ready-to-wear, it's been extended to boys. Junior may, like papa,
wear a crinkled cotton shirt, coordinated Shetland pullover and
trousers and buckskin jacket. Provided, alas, that papa can afford
them. Striped crinkled cotton shirt, 39 francs. Shetland, open at the
neck, 69 francs. Trousers, 59 francs. Buckskin jacket, 220 francs.
O'Kennedy, 50 Champs-Élysées." Figure roughly 5 francs to the dollar
Boy or girl, the child who performs his duty as an accessory to his
mother and father must have a look, a carefully coordinated look.
The ideal family has a total look consisting, for example, of a child
tailored by Rowes of Bond Street, a father with the unmistakable seal
of Huntsman of Savile Row and a mother stitched together by
Mainbocher. Or a fillette in a Dorothee Bis Bis mini-knit with a
maman in a Christiane Bailly jersey from Dorothée Bis and a papa with
a suit from the prêt-à-porter department at Pierre Cardin. In the
absence of suitable parents, the child may be coordinated to the
family that his would like to be. Would anyone ask a 4-year-old with
a blue Y on his sweater if his father really went to Yale?
Even if their parents are inept about style, the Sixties generation
of kids has its own idols. Caroline and John F. Kennedy, Jr., are
perennial leaders of the Best-Dressed Children's List, an unofficial
register that has never been formally published because there is no
need to. There are more than enough Kennedy cousins to fill the
places. The three children of John Vliet Lindsay are their potential
rivals. "We've got another little John," exulted a press photographer
after Lindsay's election in 1965. He was referring to the mayor's
son, then 5,
same age as John Kennedy. What with their skiing, horseback riding
and private school attendance, the Lindsays are just the sort of
children who enrapture socially conscious editors. Their parents,
however, have an old-fashioned reluctance to use them as props,
except in the dire need of a campaign.
The Kennedys, then, have to bear the brunt of the mass media's
attention. Women's Wear Daily photographers have caught young John
leaving the Colony Restaurant after lunch with his mother and snapped
Caroline en route from her Fifth Avenue apartment to the Convent of
the Sacred Heart. Unfazed by Caroline's uniform, Women's Wear managed
to run up a trend in her monogrammed schoolbag.
"We are all people who like to identify," says Joseph Miller,
president of the Miller Harness Company, an emporium for horse and
rider that hasn't been hurt one bit by the Kennedys' patronage and
by the widespread dissemination of photographs of Caroline and her
mother in the saddle. "When you see those pictures, they look so
nice. They look as though they were the chosen people. Naturally,
mothers feel that whatever people like that want for their children,
they want it too."
John Kennedy lacks his sister's enthusiasm for horses, but he
shows every sign of being a regular guy, according to the Central
Park playground benchwarmers who have observed him in chinos and
turtle neck. Nevertheless, he is piling up negative points from his
peers because of the sissy styles his mother foists upon him for
state occasions when the photographers are on hand. He managed to
come undone from the white silk shirt with ruffled front, blue satin
cummerbund, white shorts and black patent slippers that he wore as a
page in a Newport wedding. But the harm that just such outfits and
his hairdo have done to other boys his age is incalculable. "Young
John Kennedy, in his red shoes and the way his mother keeps him so
impeccably dressed have had a lot of influence on children's
fashion," said Bill Blass as he started designing for little boys.
John's haircut may have-brought adverse criticism from around the
country into the White House when he lived there, but. since then it
has become epidemic. The impact of his sister's blond hair drawn to
the side with a barrette when she was his age was minor by comparison.
Before John was born. the mophead coiffure was called the "English
cut" or the "Prince Charles" and it was a struggle for a mother to
refuse it for her son if she patronized chic children's barber
shops like Michael's or Paul Mole's on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
In those neighborhoods, England has always been the mother country
and the crew cut the mark of the American peasant. When Prince
Charles was a small boy, his hair was worn parted to one side with
moderate bangs that left half the forehead bare, high sideburns and
a clean-shaven neck. But then the heir to the British throne faded
away to Gordonstoun, America gained its own royal family and little
John Kennedy became the trend setter in young male fashion. Under his
leadership, the coiffure thickened into a thatch with a pronounced
bulge at the back. The bangs grew into the eyes. The "John-John cut,"
as it came to be known, was conferred even on boys who go to public
or private progressive schools rather than traditional,
English-accented institutions. They liked it, though, because it
reminded them of the Beatles.
In 1966, Mrs. Kennedy directed the barbers at the Carlyle Hotel,
where her son had his hair tended, to lengthen the sideburns and to
shorten the bangs over the eyebrows so that at least the width of an
adult finger was visible. In back, the hair was shaped to hang
straight and long from the crown almost to the collar. These subtle
changes, which were almost identical to tonsorial developments in
such jet-set barbershops as Jerry's on Madison Avenue and Alexandre's
men's salon in Paris, had their repercussions on the kiddie circuit.
Sideburns descended to the tragus-the fleshy, cartilaginous
protrusion at the front and mid-point of the ear-unless a mother was
terribly stubborn or stylishly obtuse.
John Kennedy succeeded not only to the Prince of Wales' hairdo but
to his childhood tailor as well. Rowes of Bond Street, "the custom
tailor for boys and girls," which has been clothing the children of
the British Royal Family for 100 years-it invented the sailor suit
for Queen Victoria's offspring-has been sending its man; Kenneth
Barnett, to the United States twice a year for 30 years. On these
expeditions Mr. Barnett encamps at the Plaza Hotel in New York with
brief forays to Boston and Philadelphia. In their younger days,
Caroline and John wore the Rowes brother-sister, double-breasted
French blue Harris tweed coats with the stitched velvet collars and
the inverted back pleats and half belts. (At seven, a boy announces
his departure from childhood by being measured for an open-necked
style in a more solemn color.) The Kennedys own other styles from the
Rowes wardrobe, which runs the gamut from duffle coats and kilts to
Liberty lawn dresses with genuine smocking, Eton suits in navy serge
or barathea with short pants (that American parents have given up
trying to keep boys in past the age of seven), little Buster suits
with velvet pants and silk tops and the black patent-leather shoes
with large silver buckles that hark back to Oliver Cromwell.
But the Harris tweed coat with the stitched velvet collar is the
one that the cognoscenti recognize in Royal photographs. It costs
about $75, plus 25 per cent United States customs duty, a bargain,
the faithful believe, because the large seams and four-inch hems give
it an indefinite life span. Three years, Mr. Bamett says, but that
does not include handing the coat down to a relative. The price also
embraces the bespoke-tailor sales treatment, that trenchant mixture
of understatement and overpoliteness that some Americans find so
satisfying, even if it does make them ashamed of their accents and
conscious that they talk too loudly.
The Rowes Harris tweed coat has been the backbone of the classic
children's market for decades but in 1967 the British manufacturers
who copy it for the popular-priced juvenile market were suddenly
referring to it as the John-John coat. So were the American
manufacturers and so was the French magazine Elle, which headlined a
version of the coat and a Shetland sweater and flannel shorts as
THE JOHN-JOHN LOOK.
The Kennedy children's look is, unquestionably, a form of
Anglophilic fashion with a touch of the ancien régime as practiced
by the international set. It's a look of gentility and security, of
knowing one's place right at the top in a world where children were
not beard, but, when they were seen, they looked exquisite. It
presupposes a British nanny up to the age of six or thereabouts when,
as the avid Kennedy-watchers noted, one changes to a Swiss-French
governess.
"People who are fortunate enough to have nannies would still like
neat little shirts and that well-cared-for look," said the
merchandise manager for the children's departments of Hairdo's of
London when she came to New York in the fall of 1964 to buy infants'
stretcher, blue jeans, 'T-shirts and those "lovely plaid boys'
shirts." The average child, she asserted, "spends a lot of time out
of doors." Miss Bell was putting her finger on the crux of the matter,
something that middle-class women in many nations found out after
they started taking care of their own children and doing their own
housework. The old English look is predicated on someone else coping
with the child on a steady basis, and trotting him out, immaculate
and chic, for brief contact with adults.
Why are children toilet-trained later in New York than in Colombo,
Ceylon? Because in New York there are diaper services and washing
machines, as well as psychiatrists. Why did the number of children
between 2 and 12 departing for foreign parts from airports in the New
York area jump 120 per cent from 1956 to 1965? Partly because there
was no one to leave them with at home when their parents wanted to
travel.
The realities of childhood are stimulating the captains of the new
French ready-to-wear industry to venture into the kiddie field. "The
problem with children is that they should always be in sports
clothes, but in France they are always dressing them up. That's going
to change, I hope," said Elie Jacobson, who has added a children's
section to his boutique. Even now, the chances are that the child in
dungarees and sneakers leaning into the boat basin of the Tuileries
is Parisian while the one in the sweet knitted short pants suit is a
tourist from New York.
The basic philosophy of the old British school of clildren's
fashion was sound inasmuch as it allowed a leisurely childhood. The
silhouettes were honest about the shape of a child's body, the
fabrics and colors soft and undistracting. American designers like
Helen Lee adopted and modified it for mass consumption. Miss Lee once
put it this way:
That was in 1964, the watershed of the pop Sixties, and Miss Lee,
a grandmother, was already sounding quaint.
British mass manufacturers are updating the classics by
translating them into machine-washable fabrics and livelier colors.
Unfortunately, some of them feel obliged to inject something of
Carnaby Street and the Kings Road and when they come up with blinding
prints and hip-hugger belts for toddlers (don't they know that
toddlers don't have hips?) the consequences are depressing. Restraint,
one of the most admirable British characteristics, is, however, the
enemy of forced obsolescence, as the English merchants who are trying
to memorize their American mass merchandising lessons have caught
onto.
American fashion editors are even more ambivalent and that's why
the world of children as depicted in a fashion magazine is such a
slick, sick fantasy. Trying to perpetuate the dying life style of the
British aristocracy and attempting to whet consumer appetites under
the pretense of disseminating news are irreconcilable objectives. The
biggest advertisers in their publications are the producers of
Kodel, Orion, Fortrel and other fibers that go into mass-produced,
mass-priced clothes by manufacturers whose taste often affronts the
editors' refined sensibilities.
And so the fashion editor takes the $6 synthetic knit suit she
despises and sticks it on a child model whose hair is brushed into
his eyes, and whose sausagy thighs will protrude from the short
pants. Heavy English knee socks and sturdy brogues provide the
subliminal message. Depending on the publication that employs her,
she may put him in a group photograph with a Eurasian boy (straight
black hair completely obscuring his forehead), a Negro girl and a
child of either sex who has the map of Lodz on its face. But all of
them are English from the knees down with identical heavy cuffed
socks and brogues. "That's fashion's melting pot.
Fashion editors have U stubborn sense of mission about lifting
the taste level of the masses that survives any amount of commercial
compromise they are obliged to make. And so, in the same issue in
which they "take care of the musts" (feature merchandise by big
advertisers) they try to garner some space for the crusade.
The editorial pages that are the quid pro quo for the
advertisements have captions that carefully enunciate the name of
the manufacturer and the fiber that makes the fabric in the garment
so attractive to nanny-less, laundress-less mothers, as well as the
price of the garment, which is usually sensible, too. The advertiser
is supposed to be kept happy by seeing his name in print and by the
flood of orders that will result. Unless, of course, the readers are
baffled by the presentation.
Take the December 1966 issue of Harper's Bazaar, which contains
two pages of advertising in the front of the magazine for Kate
Green-away dresses in Kodel and cotton, and Dacron and cotton fabric.
Toward the back of the magazine are four pages of photographs of
Kate Greenaway dresses in Dacron and cotton, size 7 to 12 (usually
worn by girls from 6 to 10 years old). The model is a ballet dancer
of indeterminate age and melancholy mien. She stands barefoot amid
deep grass and leafy trees, clad in a simple lace-banded shift that
would have ended in a proper length for a child, halfway up the
thigh, were it not for a lace ruffle under the hemline. The caption
reads:
Translation: The pantalets are not for sale because the
manufacturer didn't make them, but the fashion editor believes in
them. Could it be because Pierre Cardin and Jacques Tiffeau were
making them for mini-skirted adults?
So much for expediency. Now onward to the articles of faith.
In the same issue are four pages of color photographs, entitled
"Rhymes in an English Nursery," depicting what might as well be dear
Queen Victoria's children making merry while mama confers with
Disraeli in another part of the palace:
Navigate the Historic Boys' Clothing Web Site: Navigate the Historic Boys' Clothing Web chronological pages: Navigate the Historic Boys' Clothing Web style pages:
RACHEL LENT ALWAYS DOES EVERYTHING RIGHT. Mrs. Lent's holiday clothes
for little boys are paragons of fashion rectitude and propriety. Her
attention to just the right fashion details makes all the difference.
LITTLE MR. RIGHT wears Mrs. Lent's blue worsted playsuit with white
stitching trim and white pearl buttons. Mrs. Lent never heard of
plastic buttons.
RACHEL DOESN'T APPROVE Of the way most parents dress their boys.
"Mothers do everything for their little girls except buy them fur
coats, and the boys walk into school in T-shirts and jeans. A child's
appearance has an awful lot to do with his behavior. Put a girl in a
pretty dress and she behaves like a lady. If you put a boy in
something he really likes he will behave tike a well-mannered
child-and I don't mean like Little Lord Fauntleroy."
.
I am saying, little girl, I think you are a real human
being. I want to dress you with dignity. In other words, I want to
give the child presence without gimmicks or gadgets. I think back to
the time I was a child, and how I felt when I wore my pretty dresses.
Designers should do this for adult fashions, too.
Lace-trimmed pantalets peeping from under the refreshing
simplicity of a pale chocolate brown shift with encirlings of
lace--a perfect treat to wear on a visit to the Palace of Sweetmeats
in the Forest of Christmas. The pantalets, our concoction. Dress by
Kate Greenaway, in Dacron and cotton. About $11. At Bonwit Teller;
Wanamaker's, Philadelphia; Frost Brothers, San Antonio. . . .
TWINKLE. TWINKLE, LITTLE STAR? HOW I WONDER WHAT YOU ARE!
Peeping out between the curtains of the night nursery, Edwina Hicks
questions the Little Star while Master Ashley rides carelessly by on
an antique toy-horse tricycle. Edwina wears a turquoise poplin
pinafore tucked over a bright green poplin dress. Master Ashley
companions her in a poplin shirt, a jerkin, knee breeches of
corduroy. The children are the son and daughter of Mr. David Hicks
and Lady Pamela Hicks. Mr. Hicks is the prominent interior decorator;
Lady Pamela, the-daughter of Lord Louis Mountbatten and a cousin of
the Queen. Their home, decorated by Mr. Hicks, is the brick, early
Georgian, Britwell Salome, in Oxford.
LITTLE POLLY FLINDERS? SAT AMONG THE CINDERS. Nestled in
her nursery fireplace at Hampstead, 4-year-old Lady Cosina Vane
Tempest-Stewart, daughter of the Marquis and Marchioness of
Londonderry. Locks tucked in a mob cap, Lady Cosina wears pink
corduroy. The fashions on these pages were designed by Jinnie Spencer
for Mary-Louise of London.
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