Are you drowning in dolls? Would you like to reclaim your home back from your plastic friends? The Bold Doll explores some options…
Has your doll-collecting got out of hand? Hollow laughter all around. Show me the person who does not answer “yes”, and I’ll show you someone who’s either not a serious collector or who’s in serious denial.
For me the biggest challenge is not so much the dolls on display, as the storage space that everything not on show takes up. I must admit that I live in a small, modern apartment which is kept pretty tidy. Some might say obsessively so – unfairly in my opinion – I prefer to think of it as a place for everything… But I do realise this is not the natural environment of a collector, much less a collector of dolls. So I have devised strategies to allow my need for order and the chaos of a doll collection to live amicably side by side.
As a matter of fact, I am not naturally tidy at all. Left to my own devices I would be picking my way through piles of unsorted tat, and the place would be littered with projects in progress. This is pretty much how I spent my teenage years, much to the anguish of my long-suffering parents. However I soon discovered that much as it’s a huge bore to tidy things away when you’re finished with them, it’s even more annoying when you can never find anything. So whenever I move into a new place, I spend (way too much) time unpacking methodically, allocating space for every item, and getting to know the staff at my local Container Store much too well.
So far so good, but as we all know the thing about dolls is that there’s always a tempting new one to buy. It would be handy if all of the old ones would scrunch up conveniently to accomodate the new, or at least make some alternative home arrangements. As this is never going to happen I will reveal my guilty secret and aid to minimal living. I had a big storage cage built in our communal garage. This is where I stash treasures that I can’t quite bear to get rid of. It’s really more of a holding bay, as many of them will see the light of day again – if not for display then almost certainly for photography. The cage is my cut-off point: once it’s full, decisions have to be made and a ruthless cull begins. It’s partly out of meanness, because I can’t bear to pay for third-party storage. But it’s also a great focus for a collector of any kind to concentrate on what stays and what goes. I like to think of it as a way of refining the collection, so I only keep anything I truly want, and try to ensure that each item is complimentary in some way to everything else. In some ways it goes along with the tidiness and helps me to avoid feeling that the dolls have developed a life of their own and are growing uncontrollably (although it can still feel that way sometimes, of course). I try to adopt the same approach as with clothing – if it hasn’t been worn for over a year, off it goes to Goodwill.
Displaying dolls is another challenge in the sparse spaces of my home. Coupled with this is the eclectic nature of my collection. I gravitate towards dolls that interest me for a whole variety of reasons, rather than simply sticking to a particular brand or type of doll. This does have the advantage that something I find interesting today might have fallen out of favor in a few months time. Fickle, I know, but much less heart wrenching to show it the door.
If you have only a limited amount of display space, you do have to be quite selective about what’s on view, and you need quite a bit of room to store everything that’s not. But this does allow you to make a small number of dolls your focal point, and you don’t have to worry about dusting a cast of thousands.
I’ve found the way that works best for me is color-theming. This is particularly useful if you have (as I do) a wild mix of different types and sizes of dolls. I was first inspired to go in this direction by the fantastic collection of the late Sidney Spear from my local doll collectors group. The first meeting of the group I attended was at Sidney’s place and I was bowled over by her shelf of red dolls, all vintage Barbies, unified by the hue of their clothing. In fact Sidney herself, who is fondly remembered, had a great personal sense of color and was even known to wear yellow nail polish when the outfit called for it.
As soon as I got home I tried it for myself, the theming, not the nail polish – and it worked a treat. I rarely have more than half-a-dozen dolls out at once, and my idea of hell is to be trapped overnight in a toy shop with all those little beady eyes staring out at me. (I do understand that this is also many doll-collectors’ idea of heaven.) A bonus of this self-imposed limit is that I get to change the dolls on show frequently – which gives me far more play value than if they were all out on permanent display. I’m constantly re-discovering dolls I’d packed away ages ago which makes me feel as if the collection is always fresh.
Although my dolls may range in size from teeny to towering (8 to 22 inches), they all reside in the 1950’s-to-present-day period (pretty much, I rarely venture back further than mid-century) and they are generally all fashion dolls. This doesn’t necessarily make them comfortable shelf partners. But once all dressed in the same color, it’s astonishing how well they all pull together to make a unified whole without being too jarring on the eye – even in the most sparsely furnished apartment. And you won’t even need to call in the style police!
Re-published from the Fall 2010 edition of Fashion Doll Quarterly magazine.
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