Horace Mann School in the Bronx 1934
Class photos are great for viewing the range clothing styles popular for a particular age group. They are often dated right on the image, which makes things easy. This one does not include the name of the photographer however.
Here we have students dressed in their winter coats, standing on the school steps. These are upper middle class kids, since it is a private college prep school which poorer families would not have been able to afford — there wasn’t much in the way of financial aid available in those days, and this was taken during the Great Depression.
One kid in back is wearing a leather aviator’s cap, and several have leather jackets. Double breasted coats seem to have been the most popular style for both boys and girls, and a couple of the girls have large fur collars. Twenty of the twenty-two students wear hats of some sort. The boys wear knickerbockers.
