What’s a Fashion Doll?
Some may know that the French word for a fashion model is 'mannequin'. The reason for this is that modelling in fact did not begin with humans but with dolls. Modelling has, of course, changed dramatically since the age of fashion dolls, which nevertheless continue to be used or referred to by designers to this day. One great example of this is how the design duo Viktor & Rolf use fashion dolls as an ongoing part of their design practice.
Before the Living Model: the Doll
Before the inception of the living mannequin, a popular means of circulating and communicating fashion styles were dolls. No scholar has probed so deeply into the fashion model as Caroline Evans, who states that for the most part
the fashion model has much more to do with the doll than with the artist’s model who most people assume to be her immediate predecessor. Indeed the first fashion models were dolls: they were models for models if you like. And, like her predecessor, the fashion model exists on the cusp of the organic and the inorganic, between the animate and the inanimate, bridging the worlds of the living and the dead.[i]
The earliest surviving examples of this date from the mid-eighteenth century. Although cruder types in wood are also extant, the best are made of wax.
In some cases, the fashion doll and the child’s toy were used interchangeably, but the delicacy and fragility of several of these dolls can only mean that they were intended for specialized display.[ii]
Earliest Known Examples
From what can be gleaned from portraits and diplomatic reports, dolls were used for circulating examples of foreign dress since the early Renaissance.
Among the earliest surviving documents is from accounts from Charles VI of France in 1396 recording payment to Robert de Varennes, embroiderer and valet to Isabeau of Bavaria, for ‘dolls and their wardrobes for the Queen of England’.[iii]
Another early, notable case is a detailed letter from 1515 by Frederico Gonzaga, who requests on behalf of François I a doll from his mother, Isabelle d’Este.[iv] The part in question reads:
The King wishes My Lady to send him dolls dressed in the fashions that suit you of shirts, sleeves, undergarments, outer garments, dresses, headdresses, and hairstyles that you wear; sending various headdress styles would better satisfy his Majesty, for he intends to have some of the garments made to give to the women of France. Therefore, would you be so kind as to send this and as soon as possible.[v]
Isabella was an early equivalent of today’s fashionista or perhaps a royal fashion icon such as Lady Diana Spencer.
In the absence of photography, dolls were the most acceptable way of communicating matters of taste in dress and styling. Yassana Croizat speculates that Frederico’s omission of specifications as to the doll’s appearance suggests that such a request was not out of the ordinary. Isabella also received a similar request from her younger son Ferrante, residing at the court of François I’s rival, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor.[vi]
From all of this, we can assume that dolls were used as pawns by which sartorial style was traded, observed, and brokered for the assurance of courtly image. Dolls and fashion dolls differ in the way the latter was offered as diplomatic gifts.[vii]
In Francois's case, ensuring that his female courtiers were well dressed was a vital component to the expression of the glory of his reign, by the end of which more money was spent on clothing than on building.[viii]
In the Eighteenth Century
As in the Renaissance, and indicative in the quality of most that have survived, dolls in the eighteenth century were not only toys but indicators of class. They were expensive, and with clothing considerably more so. Leslie Reinhardt asserts that the bodies of dolls of this time 'were relatively uniform, and the same doll could have different clothes to characterize it as a man.
Doll bodies displayed the eighteenth century's ideal body shape, with a straight spine, shoulders held back, and a broad chest. Even undressed, they reflected the fashionable standards of the period'.[ix]
These criteria also served as necessary measures by which fashion could continue to be communicated and imported overseas, including to America and the colonies. Inevitably, such dolls made the more modest colonies uncomfortable and upset as they saw them as examples of British or French arrogance and excess.[x]
It also appears that the important dolls made no distinction between fashion dolls and play items.[xi] Nonetheless, Leslie Reinhardt remarks that ‘Dolls were such important markers of fashion that Shippen (writing from England in 1787) joked that he was afraid woman would imitate his gift doll’s lopsided, badly painted mouth’.[xii]
When we survey the best dolls from the eighteenth century, there is a high level of detail to them, especially the wax dolls. This suggests that many readapted dolls of the religious caste, where discarded sacred figures were ‘repurposed’ as hedonistic secular figures.
Already by the early sixteenth century, there were already specialized craftsmen, the poupetier or poupelier—the puppet equivalent of a tailor or bootmaker—who specialized in making dolls, as well as masks and theatrical paraphernalia.
By the reign of Louis XIV, they were also given notable names above and beyond ‘puppet’ (poupée) such as La grande Pandora and La Petite Pandora, that were dressed in lavishly detailed miniaturizations of court dress (grande toilette) and fashionable clothing (negligée).[xiii]
The highly intricate way with which eighteenth-century dolls were dressed suggests that while they may have been playthings, they would also have been decorative diversions for grown women, including communicating matters of dress amongst each other.
‘By directly encouraging demand for the textile industry’ notes Karen de Perthuis, fashion dolls served a commercial purpose but, in their uniqueness and exquisite quality, they served as a less easily definable purpose of reinstating cultural supremacy’.[xiv]
It was a common practice of French dressmakers to communicate their ideas to people abroad using dolls, a physical and deceptive because diminutive form of advertisement whose persuasion was predicated on the draftsmanship of the doll and the clothing.
Given the limited mobility of women and the exception of the Grand Tour, given that travelling and tourism were not yet fashionable pastimes, they were important drivers of trade and taste.
newenglanddolls.com — 18th Century Queen Anne Wooden Doll Reproduction — http://www.newenglanddolls.com/2020/02/18th-century-queen-anne-wooden-doll.html
What Were Some of These Historic Dolls Like?
Many of the few surviving dolls are breathtaking in their intricacy and detail. They are clothed in silk and are in ensembles that include chokers, mittens, aprons, bracelets, and other accessories. There are even a number of dolls with detailed genitals intact.[xv]
Using human hair, if not made of wax, the faces and hands were of biscuit, or unglazed porcelain, which has a seductively low lustre.
From the fact that these figures were adult women, to the relatively isolated case of their sexualization, forces the return to the beginning of the book: the use of dolls as examples of exemplary gender roles, and the lineage that has been drawn to these and the contemporary phenomenon of the Barbie doll.
After the Eighteenth Century: Commodity Culture
But in her detailed study of the cross-relation between women and dolls, Juliette Peers asserts that the line between inanimate doll and woman-as-doll becomes blurred after the eighteenth century, with the explosion of the commodity culture in the nineteenth century, and women as the prime carriers of these commodities:
The doll not only frequently looks like a woman, sometimes she is a woman; in fact, she is a clear, unmistakable sign of women's limited intellect, passivity, frivolity. In opera, operetta, ballet, and short stories, women may be confused with dolls, so closely does one symbolize the other.[xvi]
In the earliest critical examinations of fashion, such as those by the German sociologist Georg Simmel, women are decried for their superficiality, which lends themselves to be fashion objects.[xvii] In fact, the superficiality of fashion and the superficiality of women renders the two interchangeable—whence the ongoing perception that fashion is art’s poorer intellectual cousin.
The fashion system, that is, the idea that one is either in or out of fashion, is an irrepressibly modern animal, tightly associated with the modern subject's mobility and agency. Fashion is the surface on which such mobility is rendered, as an achievement or possibility, but with distinct configurations according to whether one is man or woman.
As Peers argues,
Ironically essentialism’s key stereotype is that woman is neither fixed not stable but false and empty, constantly shifting, a chimerical illusion, a performance of carefully judged and confected surfaces and maquillage: so woman in post-Enlightenment, modernist legend is primarily a doll … When the male edits and re-orders the world he is an artist, when the female edits and re-orders—principally herself—she is a doll.[xviii]
The rise of modern fashion sees that the overlapping, or confusion, of women and dolls, becomes more complicated and more widespread.
For in antiquity, identification with the doll was meant to have a positive effect on instructing basic codes of appearance and deportment. In modern times this was taken to a new level that implied a paring down of action and will.
This was also present in the use of corsets so that the body was forcibly shaped to resemble something similar to the window dummy, forcing an almost seamless correspondence between fashion doll, fashion model (mannequin), and shop dummy.[xix] The living woman had to insert herself somewhere within this artificial universe.
To anyone who has looked on with skepticism and bewilderment at the battery of dolls of an obsessive doll collector, what is also remarkable is not only quantity but the variation and loving detail devoted to the best of these. The dolls made in ever-increasing amounts from the mid-1800s were deployed as part of the fashion industry to educate and disseminate what was proper and desirable.
To use Peers' words, they were a 'fashion interlocutor', for the French fashion doll became an indispensable integer in growth and development of haute couture. While the origins of this relationship remain uncertain, these dolls depicted various ages, including the ‘bébé', the child doll, which was essentially the stand-in for the living model of child fashions.[xx]
Pierre Jumeau the Doll-Maker
One of the most successful doll-makers was Pierre Jumeau, who in 1849 already had fifty women in his employ making dolls. They were celebrated for their attention to detail, and Peers observes that such dolls had a binding effect in 'bringing a new sense of mystique and power to the designer/supplier'.
The dolls of Jumeau and others such as Adelaide Huret anticipated Charles Frederick Worth for pushing a sense of individuality and style associated with their makers.[xxi] (Another irony in this history of dolls and doubles is that Jumeau is almost the same spelling and the homonym in French for ‘twins’.)
Poupée Bébé Jumeau. Wikipedia (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Poup%C3%A9e_B%C3%A9b%C3%A9_Jumeau_(Mus%C3%A9e_des_arts_d%C3%A9coratifs,_Paris).jpg
Such examples were later no doubt helped along by periodicals such as La Poupée modèle. Founded in 1863 and still alive into the early 1900s, the doll was equivalent to the fashion magazine. By the early 1900s, publications like these featured images and advertisements of dolls and paper cutouts and their attendant clothing. They allowed women imaginary participation in both the actual world and in fantasy.
After the Second World War
What is perhaps a climax in the history of the fashion doll occurred at the end of the Second World War. By 1944, the world was not only starved physically, but culturally as well, and Parisian found itself in the doldrums. Its lucrative US market has dwindled to near nothing.
To breathe life back into the industry, Parisian couture resorted to an old concept. Couturiers would clothe fashion dolls, meticulously made and placed against the Parisian setting of leisure designed by known talents in drama and art. With their bodies made of wire, there was no shortage, their heads were made of plaster by the Catalan sculptor Joan Rebull. The settings were entrusted to the likes of Jean Cocteau, Boris Koschno and Emilio Grau-Sala.[xxii]
Some 240 poupées were produced, and Paris couture showed off its skill in clothing of meticulous detail. The dolls were exhibited in March 1945 with uproarious and cathartic fanfare, attracting a hundred thousand visitors in a matter of weeks. The exhibition then toured throughout Europe, ending in New York in 1946, and revived in 1990.[xxiii]
In many respects, the enthusiasm lavished on these dolls had the added effect of lifting the spirits of French couturiers, who quickly embarked on bringing life back to their houses in the spirit of postwar optimism and relief. Elsa Schiaparelli, for instance, embarked on a tireless campaign of bringing her own house back to prominence, including publicity stunts such as attending a charity ball with a birdcage with a live canary tied to her neck,[xxiv] reminiscent of the mannequins from the 1938 Surrealist exhibition.
Inspired no doubt by the doll exhibition in 1946, the US firm Effanbee commissioned Schiaparelli in the early 1950s to design a line of dolls to be known as ‘Honey’. These were followed by other lines for another company, Virga, named ‘Go-Go’, ‘Chi-Chi’ and ‘Tu-Tu’, names that were as cute as they were conceivably inspired by Dadaist babble to which she had been intimately acquainted in the inter-war years.[xxv] Hers is an early case of the niche market for fashion dolls that would try, in the longer-term unsuccessfully, to compete with Barbie's widening popular appeal.
Viktor & Rolf
In some circles, the fashion doll has made a contemporary comeback, particularly if one casts an eye to Viktor & Rolf's work in several exhibitions since 2008. Instead of using the conventional mannequin or dummy, they chose to make miniaturized copies of their major pieces worn by handmade porcelain-faced dolls and papier mâché bodies, recalling the classic Jumeau bébés of yesteryear.
Rather than be nostalgic, however, V&R's motley battery of dolls appear to straddle past and present, giving the scaled-down garments an emblematic, timeless quality. Since this period, dolls are distinguished inhabitants of the V&R universe, recalling perhaps Edvard Munch's justification of his paintings in woodblock prints because he could not bear to be without his 'babies'.
As the designers themselves comment about their now extensive progeny of avatars,
We wanted to create a new world. Using dolls is like taking control. When we had just started out, we created a series of miniature installations visualizing our strongest ambitions: a doll on the catwalk, a doll in a photo studio, and the scenes they enacted showed a life we desired by dared only dream of. Looking at that life from a distance, fantasizing about it in a suggestion of play—as serious as these adult toys were—instead of living it, seemed to be the closest we could get to the realization of our dreams.[xxvi]
This short meditation is also one easily conferred to fashion itself since to be fashionable is also to attempt to assume possession of an image for the sake of power and desire, but whose effect is always intangible and fleeting. V&R's dolls are talismans to the dreams of fashion, and while present, are also symbols of their ultimate elusiveness.
This elusiveness is also because, to look at things more simply, the first ‘person’ to wear the fashion garment is not a real person—and when they were, they were, at least in the earlier days of the fashion model, meant to mimic artificial bodies.
References:
[i] Caroline Evans, ‘The Ontology of the Fashion Model’, AA Files, 63, 2011, 58-59
[ii] Juliette Peers, The Fashion Doll: From Bébé Jumeau to Barbie, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004, 16-17
[iii] Cit. Yassana Croizat, ‘”Living Dolls”: François Ier Dresses His Women’, Renaissance Quarterly, 60.1, Spring 2007, 98
[iv] Ibid., 94
[v] Cit. Ibid., 97
[vi] Ibid., 101
[vii] Ibid., 105
[viii] Ibid., 119
[ix] Leslie Reinhardt, ‘Daughters, Dress, and Female Virtue in the Eighteenth Century’, American Art, 20.2, Summer 2006, 38
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Ibid., 39. Reinhardt echoes and confirms much of what has already been stated for girls and their ascent into adolescence and womanhood: 'Girls could see in these dolls, which were dressed in adult styles, pictures of womanhood and imagine the women they would become. Conversely, grown women could look to the dolls' apparel for hints on fashionable attire. Even with dolls intended as toys for little girls of this period, there were constant references to adult interest and involvement in both production and reception. For example, Thomas Shippen was aware of the wider implications when he sent the English doll to his niece Peggy Livingston, a contemporary of Elizabeth Gilmor, in America. This doll had been dressed entirely by workshop adult professionals, and he knew that women as well as his niece would study it.’
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Karen de Perthuis, Dying to Be Born Again: Mortality, Immortality and the Fashion Model, PhD dissertation, The University of Sydney, 2003, 72-73
[xiv] Ibid., 73
[xv] Croizat, ‘”Living Dolls”’, 119
[xvi] Ibid., 9
[xvii] See for example, George Simmel, ‘Psychologie der Mode’, Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1894-1900, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992, 110-111
[xviii] Peers, The Fashion Doll, 9
[xix] See also Marianne Thesander, The Feminine Ideal, London: Reaktion, 1997, 81ff.
[xx] Peers, The Fashion Doll, 43
[xxi] Ibid., 45-46
[xxii] Meryle Secrest, Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography, New York: Knopf, 2014, 293.
[xxiii] Ibid., 293-295.
[xxiv] Ibid., 296.
[xxv] Peers, The Fashion Doll, 170-171.
[xxvi] Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, ‘Interview with Susannah Frankel’, in Caroline Evans and Susannah Frankel, ed. Jane Alison and Ariella Yedgar, The House of Viktor & Rolf, exn. cat, London and New York: Merrell and the Barbican Centre, 2008, 23.
