When little boys wore dresses

Spot the odd one out: a future king, a French imperial heir, a Spanish infante and a colonial American boy with a pet bird. Actually, it’s a trick question: they’re all wearing dresses.

For roughly three centuries, from the mid-16th to the late 19th, small boys across the Western world wore gowns. The reason was plumbing, not aesthetics: early breeches had fiddly fastenings, and a toddler in a hurry needs a quick exit. A dress also gave easy access to the underclothes when a nappy needed changing. It was the elasticated waistband of its day.

James Badger, in 1760, wears a floor-length dress and holds a pet bird and cherries. Gainsborough’s Master John Heathcote poses with flowers in a dress of similar length. Charles I’s son, the future Charles II, and Mathew Brady’s Grenville Kane, two centuries apart, wear the same uniform of early childhood. Even the Prince Imperial of France, in 1858, was in skirts.

How could you tell boys from girls? Often you couldn’t: the look was gloriously androgynous. But there were clues. Francisco de Paula Antonio de Borbón, Infante of Spain, is painted with a toy drum to signal that he is male. Hair length might help, though not for siblings Eliza Cheever Davis and John Derby Davis, who share the same hairstyle as well as identical dresses fastened with a pink sash.
These boys all came from families who could afford to have their portraits made, so we know far less about working-class boys. They presumably wore hand-me-downs that were used by both sexes.

Then came “breeching”, the landmark day when a boy graduated to trousers, usually somewhere between four and eight years old. Breeching was often celebrated with a small party, and it marked the point when fathers became more involved in raising their sons.

Words like “gender-fluid” and “non-binary” are recent, but ideas of masculinity and femininity have always shifted. In modern Britain, many schools have dropped gendered uniform rules altogether. Girls routinely wear trousers to school, and boys have turned up in skirts of their own choosing. Prompting the question, who wears the trousers?