Bibliography
This annotated bibliography of scholarly publications on childhood and dress was compiled by Fiona Gould as part of her International Junior Research Associate placement with Not Only Dressed. Additional entries were prepared by Hannah Field.
We expect to add to the list over time and welcome suggestions!
Asterisked entries are by scholars involved with the network.
Bellais, Leslie. ‘The Rise and Fall of the Long White Baby Dress’. Wisconsin Magazine of History 89, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 40–49.
Bellais investigates the popularity of long white dresses as clothing for children and infants. Women’s magazines, childcare manuals, and philosophers of childhood support her claim that these dresses were designed to accomplish myriad aims. This ubiquitous clothing item either toughened the child against the cold or kept them warm as the era prescribed. Its length both prevented the child from walking or crawling far and endowed the child with more adultlike proportions. And its white colour emphasized the child’s innocence but also the dirt it collected, keeping the mother on her toes.
*Blanchard-Emmerson, Julie. ‘Feeling Time, Fashioning Age: Pre-teen Girls Negotiating Life Course and the Ageing Process through Dress’. Sociology 56, no. 3 (June 2022): 447–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385211033723.
Drawing on qualitative research with girls from the south of England, Blanchard-Emmerson presents participants’ reflections on such fashion concepts as girliness, sexualization, and trendiness—often in their own words and accompanied by their own photographs of favourite garments. The article argues that girls are savvier negotiators of the many cultural debates about age-appropriate dress than has been previously acknowledged. A further contribution of this article to the study of children’s clothing is its engagement with temporality as a hitherto under-acknowledged dimension of girls’ experience of dress.
Bodine, Ann. ‘School Uniforms and Discourses of Childhood’. Childhood 10, no. 1 (February 2003): 43–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568203010001003.
A multifaceted look at the introduction of school uniforms in Milpitas, California, in the mid- to late 1990s. Basing her methodology in qualitative research with parents and children, Bodine finds that participants who appreciated uniforms saw them as egalitarian and preventing social exclusion. She also notes the relative disinterest of families in Milpitas with high-profile concerns over gangs, violence, and designer clothing—although publicly uniform policies were articulated in relation to these concerns. Bodine’s overall conclusion is that ‘children’s clothing serves as a screen on which are projected all kinds of beliefs, anxieties and aspirations about children’ (60).
Chapman, Stanley. ‘Pasolds Ltd., 1930–70. The Strategy of the Leading British Manufacturer of Children's Wear’. Textile History 42, no. 1 (May 2011): 69–79. https://doi.org/10.1179/174329511X12967406189202.
Chapman outlines the success of Pasolds as they cornered the British children’s wear market in the mid-twentieth century. Chapman pays particular attention to marketing strategies such as location; vertical integration, where different elements such as dying textiles and manufacturing garments took place as part of the one firm; and direct marketing. Chapman’s account draws from Eric Pasold’s memoir Ladybird, Ladybird (1977).
Cook, Daniel Thomas. The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Through his examination of the rise of the children’s clothing industry from 1917 to 1962, Cook argues that the most enduring legacy of twentieth-century American society is the child consumer. Over the course of this period, a specific market for children developed, eventually dividing childhood into many clearly defined age gradations with specific clothing choices and retail spaces. The pursuit of the child consumer gave children a central role in American consumer culture and, by extension, American culture.
———. ‘Embracing Ambiguity in the Historiography of Children’s Dress’. Textile History 42, no. 1 (May 2011): 7–21. https://doi.org/10.1179/174329511X12967406189086.
Cook calls for scholarship about children’s clothing to engage with childhood studies, histories of consumption and the consumer, and sociology of dress as well as fashion theory. In particular, Cook critiques ‘the twin presumptions of a universal child or childhood faithfully reflected through clothing’ (10): presumptions that flatten out the historical, social, and other differences that govern how children wear and have worn clothes. Bringing children’s voices to scholarly accounts can help to restore the ambiguity that has defined concepts of childhood since the nineteenth century.
Edwards, Tim. ‘Living Dolls? The Role of Clothing and Fashion in “Sexualisation”’. Sexualities 23, nos. 5–6 (2020): 702–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460718757951.
Edwards argues that accounts of sexualization often depend on valuations of fashion itself. The article contains sections on sexualization in relation to clothing, fashion theory, and feminism, before undertaking a case study of a padded bra sold in the children’s section of the British supermarket Asda. Edwards places this garment in the longer history of differentiation between child and adult clothing. Edwards also makes the point that debates over sexualization focus almost exclusively on young girls, suggesting that this may occur because young boys are often encouraged to mimic their elders as part of their progression away from a gender-neutral infancy into heterosexual masculinity.
*Ferreira, Nuno, and *Maria Moscati. ‘Religious Freedom and School Uniforms: Shabina Begum, Ten Years on’. SLSA Blog, 28 April 2017. http://slsablog.co.uk/blog/blog-posts/religious-freedom-and-school-uniforms-shabina-begum-ten-years-on/.
Ferreira and Moscati discuss the high-profile UK House of Lords ruling in 2006 that then-thirteen-year-old Shabina Begum should not be allowed to contravene uniform policies and wear a jilbab to her high school. Ferreira and Moscati’s child-centred approach includes an interview with Begum where she critiques the Islamophobic and sexist characterizations she faced in media around the judgment. The authors conclude that ‘the very existence of school uniform policies needs to be questioned from a children’s rights perspective’.
*Field, Hannah. ‘A Few of the Author’s Favorite Things: Clothes, Fetishism, and The Tailor of Gloucester’. Lion and the Unicorn 34, no. 1 (January 2010): 17–33. https://doi.org/10.1353/uni.0.0484.
This article focuses on the role clothing plays in Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester. Field argues that Potter’s picturebook for children is obsessed with material objects (chiefly clothes) and that this obsession governs its characters, narrative voice, and illustrations. By translating beloved real garments into her picturebook, Potter insists that clothes are things—powerful repositories for human affection and cultural meaning—rather than evacuated commodities.
*———. ‘“A Story, Exemplified in a Series of Figures”: Paper Doll versus Moral Tale in the Nineteenth Century’. Girlhood Studies 5, no. 1 (June 2012): 37–56. https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2012.050104.
Field discusses paper-doll books for children published by the London firm Samuel and Joseph Fuller in the first decades of the nineteenth century. These works comprised three main elements: a small storybook, a set of different costumes, and a transposable head. Field uncovers the tension between the pleasure in clothes and dressing up encouraged by the dolls’ multiple costume changes, and the accompanying moral tales with their sartorial comeuppances for their child heroes and (especially) their child heroines.
*Gordon, Jennifer Farley. ‘Joseph Love, Inc.: Building and Branding a Children’s Wear Firm’. Dress 44, no. 1 (2018): 119–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/03612112.2017.1411085.
In her history of the children’s wear label Joseph Love, Inc., Gordon asserts that building a brand was equally important as building the business itself. At an opportune historical moment Love used various marketing strategies, such as novelty promotions and licensing agreements, to flourish for almost a century. His business assisted children’s wear in becoming a respected part of the fashion industry.
*———, and Sara B. Marcketti. ‘Helen Lee and Suzanne Godart: Chic for Children’. In The Hidden History of American Fashion: Rediscovering Twentieth-Century Women Designers, edited by Nancy Deihl, 105–21. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
This chapter is a part of an anthology exploring women fashion designers who helped to build the American fashion industry. Gordon and Marcketti focus on prominent children’s clothing designers Helen Lee and Suzanne Godart and their struggles in this often marginalized industry. These designers, and others, contributed to the growing importance of read-to-wear children’s clothing and of designer names in marketing these garments.
*Higonnet, Anne, and Cassi Albinson. ‘Clothing the Child’s Body’. Fashion Theory 1, no. 2 (1997): 119–43. https://doi.org/10.2752/136270497779592093.
Higonnet and Albinson contend that the idea of childhood innocence is a modern invention created by art, theory, and especially fashion. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, painters visualized this transformation in the idea of childhood, no longer portraying children as smaller adults; rather, they emphasized their youth and diminutive stature. Clothing and costumes for children established a clear barrier between childhood and adulthood in these paintings and later in photographs.
Honeyman, Katrina. ‘Suits for the Boys: The Leeds Multiple Tailors and the Making of Boys' Wear 1890–1940’. Textile History 42, no. 1 (May 2011): 50–68. https://doi.org/10.1179/174329511X12967406189167.
Honeyman’s article assesses the market for boys’ suits in the well-established Leeds tailoring industry over a fifty-year period. Working from sources including business records, brochures and other image-based advertising materials, and government statistics such as the Census of Production, Honeyman argues that boys’ suits were important to the tailoring industry and that their importance did not decrease after the First World War, as had been previously argued. She also discusses the transitional nature of the boy’s tailored suit, which became widespread in the period 1880 to 1920.
Huun, Kathleen, and Susan B. Kaiser. ‘The Emergence of Modern Infantwear, 1896–1962: Traditional White Dresses Succumb to Fashion’s Gender Obsession’. Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 19, no. 3 (June 2001): 103–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/0887302X0101900302.
Huun and Kaiser examine the gradual transformation of infantwear from the androgynous white gown to the gendered garments we know today. Through their study of the Sears catalogue and contemporary mainstream literature, the authors note a growing impulse to leave behind the perceived sentimentalities of childhood and push young boys to quickly conform with modern masculinity. The ‘flight from femininity’ seen in boys’ clothing helped to construct contemporary systems of gendered infancy.
‘IN2FROCC: Childhood and Clothing’. RIG–ACORSO, Université Rennes 2. https://acorso.org/en/childhood-and-clothing/. Accessed 9 April 2022.
This website charts the IN2FROCC network on childhood and clothing. The network is led by Aude Le Guennec, who is also a participant in Not Only Dressed. It publicizes new research by network members, who come from a range of disciplines and backgrounds, and posts an ‘Object of the Month’. IN2FROCC is part of the larger ACORSO research group, which brings together scholars working on appearances, bodies, and societies.
Jorae, Wendy Rouse. ‘The Limits of Dress: Chinese American Childhood, Fashion, and Race in the Exclusion Era’. Western Historical Quarterly 41, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 451–71. https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.41.4.451.
Jorae explores the construction of Chinese children’s American identity through clothing. Second-generation Chinese children often relinquished traditional dress in favor of Western clothing as a method of avoiding racially-motivated violence during the exclusion era (1882–1943). Chinese American children rapidly learned the limits of dress in establishing a place for them in American society, leaving them on the periphery of two worlds: the Chinese and the American.
*Le Guennec, Aude. ‘Du musée à la thèse: vers un modèle d’étude du vêtement de l’enfant’ [From museum to theory: Towards a methodology for studying children’s clothing]. Tétralogiques, no. 23 (March 2018): 115–42. http://www.tetralogiques.fr/spip.php?article90.
Le Guennec’s ambitious article views children’s clothing as a tool of socialization and education that is often wielded by adults. Complicating these power dynamics, Le Guennec analyzes children’s appropriation of fashion. This article calls for a movement beyond garment-focused studies of children’s clothing into more theoretical and joined-up approaches. It also insists on the importance of this often marginalized subject for understanding the history and sociology of childhood more broadly.
Matthews David, Alison. Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2015.
Through an analysis of various dyes, garments, and industries, Matthews investigates deadly fashion trends popular in the United Kingdom, United States, and France from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. In her wide-ranging examination, Matthews focuses both on the wearers of these dangerous garments and on those who had to manufacture them. She pays special attention to children when discussing the popularity of flannelette in her chapter ‘Inflammatory Fabrics: Flaming Tutus and Combustible Crinolines’.
Meadmore, Daphne, and Colin Symes. ‘Of Uniform Appearance: A Symbol of School Discipline and Governmentality’. Discourse 17, no. 2 (1996): 209–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/0159630960170206.
Meadmore and Symes provide a Foucauldian genealogy of the school uniform. While they focus in particular on Australia as a case study, they also give a wider history of school uniform from its origins in early modern ecclesiastical dress through public school reforms in Victorian Britain to widely divergent twentieth-century educational contexts, many of them colonial. They view uniforms as disciplinary apparatuses to homogenize and control children, but also resist the idea of non-uniformed bodies as free from power.
*Miles, Nicola. ‘CLOTHKITSFILM SD 480p’. YouTube, 14 September 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbrQwZzDiRc.
This short video, part of Miles’s doctoral research at the University of Brighton, explores the educational and creative dimensions of how children experience clothing. It focuses in particular on the British firm ClothKits, interspersing an account of the firm with personal narrative.
O’Connor, Kaori. ‘The Ladybird, the Dressing Gown and Pasolds: Cultural Icons of the “Golden Age” of British Childhood’. Textile History 42, no. 1 (May 2011): 22–49. https://doi.org/10.1179/174329511X12967406189121.
O’Connor provides a history of childhood in mid-twentieth-century Britain by following the fortunes of the Pasold family and their Ladybird brand of children’s clothing. Taking an anthropology of fashion approach, O’Connor’s key concerns include culture, commerce, and demographics. As with pieces cited here by Chapman, Cook, Honeyman, Pollen, and Rose, this article arose from ‘Clothing Childhood, Fashioning Society’, the 2008 Pasold Trust Conference organized by O’Connor and held at the Foundling Museum in London.
*North, Susan. Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
North rewrites the history of sanitation in the early modern period, arguing that—contrary to received opinion—both skin and linen were regularly washed in England at this time. North’s book shows the advantages of bringing children’s clothing into dialogue with larger histories of fashion and material culture, as she traces healthful habits of washing and wearing back to practices established in infancy.
Paoletti, Jo B. ‘Clothing and Gender in America: Children’s Fashions, 1890–1920’. Signs 13, no. 1 (Autumn 1987): 136–43. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174031.
Using magazine descriptions and images of children’s clothing from the turn of the century, Paoletti contends that changes in children’s fashion were far more dramatic than those in adult fashion. Whereas men’s and women’s clothing gradually became more similar even while retaining certain gendered distinctions, the differences between boys’ and girls’ dress become greatly pronounced as they left the white gowns and long hair worn by either sex behind. The author posits that this shift took place largely because of a change in priorities; during the period 1890 to 1920, the distinction between children and adults became less important, while the distinction between men and women gained prominence. In her examination, Paoletti focuses primarily on boys’ fashions.
———. Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012.
A foundational work on gender and children’s clothing in America. Paoletti reveals a series of seismic shifts over the twentieth century as changing fashions saw individual garments, colours, and detailing seen as more or less appropriate for girls and boys. Paoletti notes that even moments of demand for gender-neutral garments tend to focus on details and colours, rather than more substantively rethinking the gendered parameters for children’s clothing.
Petersen, Trine Brun. ‘Fashioning Children: From Angels to Equals, a Case Study of a Danish Fashion Company and Their Boutique for Children’s Clothing’. Fashion Theory 25, no. 1 (2021): 837–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2020.1721675.
Petersen examines a Danish children’s boutique underpinned by the reforming spirit of 1960s and 1970s counterculture. Iconic garments made for Englebørn (Angel children), including flexible tricot t-shirts, were sold alongside hard-wearing denim from OshKosh and Lee; all of these items reflected a commitment to functionality and an egalitarian approach to dress. More extravagant garments reflected the idea that dress could be playful and joyful for children.
*Pilcher, Jane. ‘No Logo? Children’s Consumption of Fashion’. Childhood 18, no. 1 (February 2011): 128–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568210373668.
Pilcher begins with a literature review of key issues in the sociology of children as consumers, including agency, adult influence, and socialization. She then presents the results of an ethnographic study of children’s consumption of fashion, with a focus on children aged five to twelve in Britain. The children Pilcher worked with knew a range of brands and were able to comment on commercial attributes such as fashionability, price, and age differentiation. While awareness of and engagement with fashion labels differed from child to child, the role of clothing in self-individuation and in peer relationships was always apparent.
*———. ‘What Not to Wear? Girls, Clothing and “Showing” the Body’. Children and Society 24, no. 6 (November 2010): 461–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1099-0860.2009.00239.x.
This article insists on the importance of qualitative research as opposed to reading from market trends when considering young people’s consumption of clothing. Pilcher focuses in particular on how girls negotiate worries over sexualization in their engagement with fashion. The desire of the participants to ‘age up’ (or not) is explored through interviews touching on specific garments, including off-the-shoulder tops, short skirts, and high-heeled shoes.
*Pollen, Annebella. ‘Performing Spectacular Girlhood: Mass-Produced Dressing-Up Costumes and the Commodification of Imagination’. Textile History 42, no. 2 (November 2011): 162–80. https://doi.org/10.1179/174329511X13123634653820.
Pollen examines the range of dress-up costumes played with by young girls ages three to eight. The mass production and commercialization of cheap costumes, as well as character merchandising, make these products both more widely available and more limiting to children’s imaginations. These costumes reflect the ultra-feminine role models seen in the media, inspiring young girls’ performance of stereotypical gender roles.
Reinhardt, Leslie. ‘Serious Daughters: Dolls, Dress, and Female Virtue in the Eighteenth Century’. American Art 20, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 32–55. https://doi.org/10.1086/507499.
Reinhardt uses eighteenth-century British and American paintings of women and children as a lens through which to examine feminine virtue and the educational path required to achieve it. The dolls and dress portrayed in these images, Reinhardt posits, represent the male husband or artist’s attempt to check female sexuality and independence. These artistic trends eventually reached beyond the canvas, influencing women’s fashion and affecting the adoption of childlike and symbolically innocent dress.
*Rose, Clare. Children’s Clothes since 1750. London: Batsford, 1989.
Rose’s comprehensive history of children’s clothing begins in 1750, when the idea of childhood as more than simply a stepping stone to adulthood emerged. Using autobiographies, advertisements, paintings, diaries, and other written and visual sources alongside the garments themselves, Rose highlights the importance of children’s clothing as a window into diverse fields from economic history to the philosophy of education. Rose’s book also stresses clothing as central to a child’s upbringing. Dress played a large role in which jobs young people could hold and which schools they could attend; later in life, clothing figured prominently in reminiscences of childhood.
*———. ‘Continuity and Change in Edwardian Children’s Clothing’. Textile History 42, no. 2 (November 2011): 145–61. https://doi.org/10.1179/174329511X13123634653785.
Rose examines children’s clothing from 1885 until 1920, comparing late-Victorian and Edwardian boys’ sailor suits and girls’ pinafores to the unisex knit jumpers of the interwar period. The shift in children’s clothing over this period seems indicative of a flattening of gender and class distinctions in dress, but Rose argues that additional factors such as fashionability, fit, cleanliness, expense, and the accessories worn with these garments changed the meanings they projected. Shifting ideas of childhood and the growth of clothing mass production did not eliminate social distinctions in fashion; they simply changed the form in which they survived.
*———. ‘Evaluating the Manufacturing and Retailing Practices of H. J. and D. Nicoll through a c. 1860 Boy’s Suit’. Textile History 45, no. 1 (May 2014): 99–118. https://doi.org/10.1179/0040496914Z.00000000039.
Rose uses a H. J. and D. Nicoll ready-to-wear boy’s suit from 1860 as a window into both the origins of mass-produced clothing in Britain and shifts in age-marked clothing. Pairing trousers with a jacket associated with young boys marks a step in the transition from the frocks based on women’s clothing to loose-cut knickerbockers to adult men’s trousers. This suit served to distinguish its adolescent wearer from younger boys.
*———. Making, Selling and Wearing Boys’ Clothes in Late-Victorian England. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.
Rose’s book draws on a wealth of neglected sources, including manufacturers’ designs, catalogues, and the archives of Barnardo’s children’s homes, in order to reposition boys’ fashion in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. Thematically organized, the book deals with subjects including respectability and social class, design, advertising, price, consumption, and masculinity. Rose reveals boys’ fashion as integral to wider concerns in the history of consumption, such as the rise of mass production.
Steinberg, Aliza. ‘Garments Worn by Babies, Infants and Youths’. In Weaving in Stones: Garments and Their Accessories in the Mosaic Art of Eretz Israel in Late Antiquity, 266–78. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2020.
This chapter is part of Steinberg’s text on dress as pictured in religious mosaics from the fourth to the seventh centuries A.D. in Israel. She demonstrates through extensive analysis of texts and images that children’s clothing closely resembled that of adults. However, this lack of distinction does not indicate that children were treated as adults; rather, the use of undergarments as the child aged hints at a difference in attitudes towards children versus adults that is not as readily apparent.
*Vaclavik, Kiera. Fashioning Alice: The Career of Lewis Carroll’s Icon. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
Vaclavik’s book explores Alice in Wonderland as a fashion icon from her first appearance in 1865 up to the present day. Viewing dress and appearance as central to Carroll’s universe, Vaclavik discusses the original books, an array of adaptations, from Edwardian revisionings through Disney’s 1951 feature film to Tim Burton’s 2010 update, and the practice of dressing up as Alice. While Vaclavik works from a specific case study, she also establishes larger methodologies for studying dress in children’s literature and how it spills out into the real world.
*———. ‘World Book Day and Its Discontents: The Cultural Politics of Book-Based Fancy Dress’. Journal of Popular Culture 52, no. 3 (June 2019): 582–605. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12798.
This article analyzes how children dress up as book characters for the UK initiative World Book Day as a form of embodied translation. Vaclavik points out the ways in which gender and race govern the options children have to incarnate different book characters, while also keeping the faith that World Book Day and the costumes it occasions could become an opportunity for children to think critically about literature.
*Vänskä, Annamari. Fashionable Childhood: Children in Advertising. Translated by Eva Malkki. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Fashionable Childhood scrutinizes themes of consumerism and childhood through visual culture, in particular fashion advertising. Chapter subjects include how fashion defines childhood in contemporary culture, the opposed concepts of innocence and sexualization, and the various media panics occasioned by children’s clothing. Acutely attuned to the importance of identity, Vänskä notes the association of innocence with whiteness and the imposition of heterosexuality often present in fashion advertisements depicting children.
*———. ‘“I Am Lenni”: Boys, Sexualisation, and the Dangerous Colour Pink’. Sexualities 22, no. 3 (March 2019): 296–309. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460717736720.
Vänskä traces the history of male attire to answer the question of why skirts, dresses, and the colour pink have become taboo in the world of menswear. The symbolic meanings of clothing items and colours have greatly transformed over time. Both heterosexual privilege and hegemonic masculinity keep men and boys from taking certain fashion risks, as these ideas dictate that men must prove their manhood partly by wearing the ‘correct’ clothing.
*Wild, Benjamin Linley. Carnival to Catwalk: Global Reflections on Fancy Dress Costume. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020.
A look at the role dressing up has played in society, from the Middle Ages to the present day. Providing a useful definition of fancy dress according to duration and circumstance of wear, transgression of the usual identity categories of the wearer, and (appearance of) frivolity, Wild organizes his argument according to theoretical themes such as coherence and clarification. Wild discusses children’s fancy dress across this history, although it is not his sole focus.
Wilson, Verity. Dressing Up: A History of Fancy Dress in Britain. London: Reaktion Books, 2022.
Wilson’s history of British fancy dress focuses on the period between the accessions of Victoria and Elizabeth II. With beautiful illustrations and arresting accounts of cultural practices as diverse as burning ‘Viking’ ships and Victory Teas at the end of the First World War, Wilson insists on fancy dress’s importance to British identity—from missionaries to aristocrats to children, whose costumes are a persistent theme.
