In this blog we are looking into the children’s clothing we hold in our collections. Most of the clothing we keep in our museums covers the last 200 years.
Until the early 1900s both boys and girls wore dresses from birth until the age of about eight. These dresses would be made of cotton, be floor length and be embellished with lace, flounces and up to three petticoats for upper classes children. Most dresses would have been white as they could be easily bleached back to colour. These dresses did inhibit movement and toddlers found it difficult to move freely when crawling and learning to walk.