Two things I love: the influence of men’s bespoke tailoring on women’s fashion, and saving money. Not natural bedfellows – but please bear with me and I’ll try to pull it together. For the male tailoring, nothing wrong with that – it worked for Coco Chanel and Yves St Laurent after all. Black, brown, and navy blue – class on a shoestring. For the money part, my doll-collecting has had a reality-check as the coffers run low – so making more of what you’ve got is truly in fashion this season! Although it’s tempting to rush out and buy everything shiny and new, nowadays I’m looking for more fash for my cash. I’m interested in dolls that give me a lot of mileage – so in with the wigged girls for loads of looks from one doll: the only outlay is hair and maybe a bit of acrylic lip-gloss to ring the changes. And I’ve rediscovered some of the forgotten beauties languishing at the back of the doll cupboard.
I’m also thinking of doll-enjoyment-for-less by being as creative as possible with my collecting. For example by finding inexpensive versions of dolls that I can make look a million dollars – lots of play value and minimum output. People who know me will be well-aware of my predilection for the dye-tub and it’s never put to better effect than on remodeling dolls picked up on the cheap.
My first candidate was an old Kingstate doll – wrecked by the dreaded non-colorfast black undercrackers. I picked her up on eBay for less than $10 including shipping. This former beauty had so many black marks from stocking seams, garters, bra, and panties, that treatment with Remove-Zit or any other stain-removal brand would have stretched the product well beyond any reasonable boundaries. So I took the radical step of dipping the whole doll in a bucket of black dye. This was my first experiment with dying plastic. Frankly, it wasn’t a huge success. I have since learned that the surface of doll needs to be absolutely grease-free to ensure uniform coverage. A rubbing alcohol /rubber gloves combo works well. Never one to be daunted I thought this patchy Miss would be a good candidate for a little glitter. Golden Acrylics make a great paint called “Gold Mica Flake” – it gives the appearance of a sprinkling of little shards of gold leaf. Not exactly what I first intended but she turned out rather well. That’s the beauty of experimenting with your dolls – especially if you’ve spent very little on them – it doesn’t really matter if things go wrong, you can usually salvage something from the situation.
Another favorite cost-cutter is to seek out lesser-known dolls that are perhaps out-of-fashion or have just been forgotten about by the modern market. For example, I recently found Ideal’s Little Miss Marker on sale for way less than she sold for when she was first issued in 1980. She was based on the child actor Sara Stimson who starred in the eponymous film – a remake of the Shirley Temple original. I’m not sure why, but something about this doll spoke to me. She’s big-headed with an uncompromising bowl-cut and reminded me a little of a rather serious version of Blythe. The doll had only a limited run of about 6,000 and came in just one outfit – another bonus for a collector on a budget as there wasn’t the temptation to go out and buy all of the outfits in sight to complete the set. The tailoring of the sailor suit is great – a nicely structured A-line mini dress with an inverted pleat – much in the manner of 1960s Mary Quant or Dior – topped off with a cute little bolero jacket. It’s a well-made girl’s version of a traditional male sailor suit, the hat and boots I could care less about and I wasn’t exactly mad about the nautical colorway. I wanted to try a smarter, more monochromatic look. Another job for trusty Ritt dye – luckily the black took really well in this case. Redressed, suited and booted with shoes and hose from Agnes Dreary, she has something of Wednesday Addams about her. Rather chic and yet severe – exactly what I was hoping for. A doll resplendent in Parisian couture with a dime-store price-tag. As she doesn’t have a wardrobe I plan to make one for her based on some of the pictures on the box – there’s a gorgeous thick wool coat with vintage Chanel styling that I can’t wait to tackle. I might even buy a few more of these dolls for more experimentation: modifying the outfits, and maybe even a re-root – she’d look super-snooty in a chestnut brown chignon, and rather classy in a jet-black bob.
I’ve often admired Miss Revlon, Cissy, and their fab fifties fashions, but have never really been able to justify the cost once the bills for the modern fashion dolls have been paid for. A tiny bit of research led me to vintage look-alikes at bargain prices. For example the 14R head mold (marked on the back of the neck) was commonly used by a whole variety of manufacturers in the 1950s such as Royal Dolls, Deluxe Reading, and Eegee amongst others. These factories made cheaper versions of the more ritzy dolls. Now I must admit that the quality of these dolls can be variable, and is not up there with the top-of-the-range gals. But, shallow as I am, I was just aiming for a look – so I found the prettiest brunette 14R doll I could see for about a tenth of the price of a comparable Cissy. Sold nude and not in bad condition – apart from a couple of body blemishes that proved to be easily removable – and with hair in decent shape.
This project was all about creating a smart, structured look. I wanted to get away from the usual frills and flounces associated with these dolls and use lightweight men’s suiting to create a more streamlined outfit. In this case it was a pared-down dress pattern for the 14-inch Lisa Littlechap doll (by Remco, 1963) in Johanna Gast Anderton’s excellent book Sewing for Twentieth Century Dolls – a great resource for those of us with champagne ideas and beer money. Enlarging the pattern to fit an 18-inch doll – another money-saving idea to make a meager supply of patterns go further – I made a rough paper template to check for size. The bodice was a little wide, so I just sliced a little out of the middle and I was ready to make the final pattern.
By chance this coincided with an upcoming meeting of my local doll group, with the alphabetic theme ‘XYZ’. A great chance to put another plan into action – I’d previously tried transferring my fabric designs onto store-bought paper-backed fabrics run through an ink jet printer. But I was sure that a white tightly-woven cotton cut to 11 x 8½ inch letter size would work just as well as the pre-prepared products you can buy. My doll-group chum Tula (who shows her gorgeous doll couture on the US DollDivas site as TallulahBelle), had advised me to lightly spray the back of the fabric with lo-tack adhesive and to stick it loosely on thin paper. I ended up with a couple of 11 x 8½ inch swatches of fabric printed with my ‘XYZ’ design, which was going to make a great candidate for the bodice of the dress I had in mind.
My most ambitious tailoring task was saved for last – I had been longing to try out one of Kate Mitsubachi’s elegant designs from her book Barbie Mode: Dresses for Classic Barbie Dolls – but I had been put off by the apparent complexity of the patterns and the fact that this book is totally in Japanese (not one of the languages on the curriculum at my primary school in rural England). But buoyed with confidence from my “Miss Revlon” success, I wanted to work with a distinguished scrap of dogtooth check fabric I’d had stashed away for a while. It was tricky working at the smaller scale, and I still find the whole lining methodology completely perplexing. But it worked! The dress is built like an elongated version of a traditional footman’s jacket and yet looks bang up to date on one of my Fashion Royalty girls –I love mixing vintage and modern.
You might have noticed that I’ve been pretty monochromatic in my choice of dolls and fabrics. This was by design, on the basis that if you’re trying to make high-style on a low budget you’re likely to have more success if you stick to a limited palette than if you go truly garish. Stay mindful of male tailoring and fabrics closely aligned to a men’s wardrobe, think Armani as opposed to Versace when you’re trying to make a lot with a little, and you won’t go far wrong.
This story first appeared in Fashion Doll Quarterly magazine in 2010.
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