Mother Hubbard dress

[2] In the 1880s the artist Kate Greenaway illustrated popular books of English nursery rhymes showing children in smock dresses.

These came to be a popular style of children's dress which were given the name 'Mother Hubbard' by fashion writers at the time after the nursery rhyme character in the books.

[1] Around the same time a dress reform movement arose that sought to free western women from the tight and relatively impractical fashion of small, corseted waists and heavy skirts.

Contemporary with this in Victorian times Christian missionaries began to spread the gospel to native peoples living in lands controlled by western countries.

The Mother Hubbard garments were insisted upon by the missionaries, who were often horrified to find a flock of near-naked people in their churches.

In Samoa and Tonga, the design has taken on a two-piece form, with classic mother hubbard blouses (long, wide, loose-fitting with puffy sleeves) over ankle-length skirts, called "puletasi" and "puletaha," respectively.