Two Sisters in Matching Blue Sweaters, Christmas, 1960s

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Two Sisters in Matching Blue Sweaters, Christmas, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Two Sisters in Matching Blue Sweaters, Christmas, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-02C350

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Somebody bought two of the same sweater, in the same pale blue, in two different sizes, and called it a coordinated outfit rather than a costume. This was a normal impulse in the 1960s, when family photographs were meant to prove that a household had matching anything, and sisters photographed together were expected to look like a matched set of teacups rather than two separate people with opinions.

The cake with its candles sits mostly out of frame, upstaged by a red twist candle and a poinsettia arrangement doing the actual work of announcing the season, since nobody trusted a plain white cake to communicate Christmas on its own. The girl on the left wears glasses with the confident black frames of someone who has accepted this is simply what glasses look like now, an assumption every decade makes about its own eyewear right before the next decade disowns it.

Both of them smile the specific smile of people who have been told to smile, which is not quite the same as being happy, though it photographs identically. The good china visible in the cabinet behind them was for display, not use, on the theory that a family's dishes should be admired more often than they are eaten from.

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