SUPER!

Get the skinny on Superdoll, in an exclusive 2009 interview with the brains behind the brand from.

Behind an unassuming door on a main road in East London is Superfrock HQ. I am here to meet Charles Fegen and Desmond Lingard, creators of the Sybarites, at their exclusive Salon.

Up two flights of stairs, behind a red beaded curtain is a modern take on the Victorian parlor, with an overwhelming display of dolls in an eclectic mix of cabinets, vases, bell jars, and cases.The arrangement changes regularly depending on Charles and Des’s latest whim and passions. The biggest case houses the current collection: the Fortune girls in their most recent and future guises.

The Sybarites have a huge and enviable brand loyalty – there are few other products that sell out within a matter of hours of their launch. But the brand has not been an overnight success, theguys worked on it for almost 20 years without recognition. Des made dolls as a child, but although doll-making was his first love he thought, “I can’t do this for the rest of my life so I went and studied fashion.”

Charles and Des initially met through fashion, Des’s interests were in ready-to-wear while Charles specialized in couture. They began collecting and designing for dolls purely for their own enjoyment. However an overdue property tax bill prompted them to put a beaded dress, made for a doll in their collection, on eBay. It brought in more that$200 – their bill was covered. The lucky owner of that dress today is sitting on an item worth several times that sum to a Sybarite collector!

While Charles was working for a London couturier, he was handed a Robert Tonner doll and asked to create a fashion for a Dolls Against Addiction auction in1996. “Everyone was bowled over by the finished doll and said, ‘Wow you can make money at this!’” and Charles thought, “Yeah right!” It was the early days of eBay and besides, his work was couture for women not dolls.

The scale-down from human- to doll-size is not straightforward. As Charles explains, “You have to forget everything you know and work out a new way to do it, you can apply couture technique but you don’t make a doll shirt the same way you make a human shirt. But the great thing about making couture for dolls is that they don’t put on weight!

As fashion doll collectors, they were always looking out for new dolls. When a certain new doll appeared on the market, it inspired them to create a ‘world’ beyond anything doll manufacturers had done before, using real couture fabrics, styling, and techniques. As Charles explains, “It cannot be real couture unless you have the training, we elevated someone else’s product because we liked her enough … but she still wasn’t what we needed and that’s when we did our doll.”

Charles and Des worked on their doll for 4years in total secrecy. Having already created this world of one of a kind miniature couture, Charles says, “It became so easy for us – we had done it all before in 1:1 and now in miniature scale!” The Sybarites, however, were never intended to be a replication of the glamorous style and gowns of their human-scale designs, they were to be much edgier and reflect a quite different lifestyle.

As part of their research, the guys would go to message boards and ask, “What do you think of dolls with wigs?” The response being, “Urghh, we hate them, ­wigs are rubbish!” Or, “What do you think of articulation?” This at a time when other manufacturers were considering simple revised articulation at the elbow – and it was widely felt that customers did not want any more movement than this. “It took all the money we had in the world, to make this highly articulated doll that nobody knew about.”

Des has done a lot of sculpting because of early marionette-making, “My sculpting is very stylized, it’s not realistic, so we did the initial rough sculpt, but we got the professionals in to refine the look.” They won’t reveal if they based the sculpt on any particular person,they used many reference points”.

All the dolls are hand-painted and hand-assembled, all the wigs are hand-applied, and all the designing is done by hand. The only thing done by computer is to digitally re-master the body. This was done just before Couture Savage, mainly because a factory shortcut caused a previous collection to suffer shipping damages. “When it comes to development we will have no limitations of expense, skill levels or technique and do what is right for the product. We’re re-doing the body next year.”

It was important from the outset that clothes were removable, “Lots of dolls have non-removable clothes, and we feel strongly that you have to be able to remove the clothes, otherwise it’s not a fashion doll. High heels, boobs and changes of clothes – that’s the brief. When you look inside our garments you can see some of the tricks, but we always remember that it’s a commercial product that must stand up to the rigors of wear and tear.”

A starting point for a new doll could be apiece of fabric, an image, even some graffiti on the wall outside. Charles and Des get a lot of inspiration from the local area, uncompromisingly urban yet within striking distance of the groovy bars and shops of Hoxton. As Charles points out, “Look out of the window and I promise you something interesting will be going on.”

In fact the guys are not that obsessive about make-up nor fashion. “We’ll see the new collections and maybe think ‘Oh that’s amazing’ – but it isn’t what drives us. We’ll be walking down the street and see something unexpected, maybe yellow socks over a pair of pink tights and it sticks with you. We won’t even discuss what it was… we’ve been together for so long that we understand each other’s thought processes so well”.

Des adds, “When we’re working on the couture collections – like those exhibited in Paris, London, Moscow and most recently Tokyo – we won’t look at magazines, we won’t watch the television. We don’t want to be influenced by anything that might change your train of thought. A week before the collection you could open a magazine, see something,that will just change everything and then you’re in trouble. Our ready-to-wear collections are often influenced by trends and fashion but not the couture – we work very hard at making that stuff unique.”

The couture dolls can take 200 hours foreach piece. They are huge fans of Christian Lacroix, “He was given $7 million to change the face of fashion – he also changed our lives, I get gooseflesh just talking about it.” Charles continues, “We like Gaultier, Galliano, and of course McQueen, but we don’t really love anyone to the extent we adore Lacroix.”

It’s clear that this is not just a job or a business for these guys it’s something much more visceral… their enthusiasm shines through and their eyes light up with a passion when they talk about their work, they have an experimental approach and are refreshingly unafraid of taking chances.

They feel that as fashion dolls are a record of our times, they must be exposed to the world of fashion for the ready-to-wear. Des mentions that fashion dolls are a statement of fashions for that era, a record of the way we look.

Their couture shows are strictly limited by invitation. Clearly not the typical runway event with live models… so for those of us not lucky enough to be on the guest list, Charles and Des described some recent events:

Charles: For our first two Sybarite couture shows, we had the dolls in our hotel room and had pre-arranged private viewings. Then we hosted an actual event which comprised an opera in four acts, about back stabbing best friends, gossips, and a lesbian love triangle.

Des: We had a gallery a stonesthrow away from our studio. It was mock baroque with loads of candles, we had four glass cases and we unveiled them one-by-one, to reveal the story. After that we did Self-Medication / Anti_ticulation, about the power of media persuasion, in a Parisian gallery. The collection was pale whites, and creams, in a stark white space with individual dolls on plinths. The only color came from our handprints in blood red on the walls.

C: It was about social pressures – the dolls were constrained by surgical corsets worn over the top of couture gowns –and media pressure in forming ideals of beauty in the minds of impressionable humans.

D: Then we did War and Peace – It started out as a wedding, but the actual exhibition was about tribes of the last DIVAS on earth, scouring corpses in search of couture. It was set in an apartment in Paris…

C: … in total darkness, only black light.The collection had exquisite embroidered and beaded lace, with fluorescent layers underneath, so you would see the fluorescents but not the beading. The makeup was done in shades of brown and invisible fluorescents. The following day, people came back for a second private view in daylight when it looked entirely different. It was also only then that we allowed the press in to shoot the collection for the BBC’s program ‘Inside Out’.

D: Then it was The Resurrection, in Moscow at a hugely crowded venue. We had 15 dolls across five cabinets and changed their poses every 20 minutes.

C: We’d remove all the dolls but one, so it was as if no one was talking to her and she’d be bashing on the cabinet.

D: Resurrection was a beautiful collection, it went down really well. There was a big element of performance art.

The first doll to catch my eye as I entered the Salon was the very rare Beth Ditto doll (pdf download of press release), perched on a mini leopard-skin rug, precariously balanced on a pile of boxes. Only two of these dolls exist – one is with Evans, the UK plus-size clothes store, who commissioned Superdoll Collectibles to help launch their new clothes range aided by top fashion photographer Philip Rankin.

They agreed to create a Beth Ditto doll because Charles is great fan of Hans Bellmer, “I would love one of those huge dolls of his. That is the main reason we did Beth Ditto, so we could do the Bellmeresque body. The perfection in purist ball jointing and surrealism really got us excited with this project!”

So, following on from Beth Ditto, are there plans for more real people dolls? “Perhaps, but we are not big on ‘celeb culture’, yet we never say ‘never’. We generally don’t do celebrity dolls, our dolls are figments of our imagination and that’s how we like it.”

Before my visit I had asked Sybarite fans and collectors what they would want to know from Des and Charles. So I asked about the ethnic dolls: there will be a new Inque, with a darker skin tone and a resculpted head. The original doll was a new sculpt: the new Inque is sculpted as a clone, by going back to the original Malice head and changing her into Inque, “Now she’s got the bloodline”.

The choice of skin tone is important for the ethnic dolls. For Raja there was a choice between three tones, but the most orange one kept jumping out, “It’s a bit spray tan, generally we don’t struggle with skintones, but with Raja we did.” Choosing the skin tones can be tricky –a flat swatch of Pantone color looks different when rendered in three dimensions with modelling, shading, facepaint, and hair applied.

There will be two new sculpts, Voltaire and Ivory, which are brand new clones. I was intrigued by one of the new sculpts –Ivory – she really reminds me of somebody, but I can’t think who…

Cosma is a doll that’s widely loved and I wondered if there was any possibility of a reappearance? Charles laughs, “Like where, in a discotheque? Cosma is the Director’s Cut (DC) sculpt, we got a guy in from Madame Tussaud’s to work on the original Malice, but we also sculpted an alternative head ourselves. We only ever used DC in Stoke-on-Trent, never in the Chinese factory, however when we did use DC for the Innoquii, the master was under strict supervision and did not leave our sight. That’s how much we love DC. So… on Cosma that’s a no!”

When I asked if there will ever be a Sybarite boy, I was amazed to find he already exists. He’s called Malachae, and he’s based on popular artworks and artist renditions of Jesus Christ, but sans beard. He’s anatomically perfect and definitely a Sybarite but there are no plans to go into production with him– your only chance to see him is to get an appointment to visit the Salon in London.

There is no plan to use glass-eyes in the Sybarites, the feeling is that with big Asian BJDs it really works but with this size it looks odd. Charles does have a doll called Star, with glass eyes,“But her makeup is so thick, her eyelashes and eyes so dark that you can’t even see the eyes are glass. For a production doll, no.”

There will be no more Innoquii’s, sadly, the guys are sticking to their launch plans. No fashions, no extras, no replacement wig plates, that’s it. “We want them to remain their own little entity, forever.” Nor can porcelain be customized, the paint is fired on and would have to be ground off. But interestingly, the eyes can be changed, as can their hair – indeed the color of the wig plates matches the nipples, except for the nurse who has red nipples and a black wig plate.

The Fortune Girls’ new collection is LOVE, Will and Testament. These girls are rich kids in an economic recession. In the last recession punk was global, so they’ve bought into punk culture. They’re squatting in their father’s house but as they’re heiresses they have suitable alter egos – Fortune Heiresses, and there are Fortune Hunters, they know what they want, and they know how to get it.

Another area under development is the Member’s Only section of the website. “It’s in the testing phase and will be awesome. People have been collecting our images for years, and have got vast libraries of our work. It’s amazing and really flattering but now we will have it all on our site, catalogued and with full reference wherever possible. It will be an enormous site, with a full archive. It will have customer discounts and different levels of membership, and exclusives.” This will be a huge benefit to everyone who frets that images disappear from the Superdoll website once they’re sold.

It was a nice surprise to learn that a Sybarite book is planned to coincide with the fifth birthday of Venus D’Royce,– on February 14, 2010, just before the Paris show. The show is to be a big event; a Retrospective of Sybarites, and the book will include (allegedly) a full archive, the back catalog, and a ‘warts and all history’ of the doll, with every doll and every dress where possible. To coincide with this there will be a 6-month long exhibition at Le Musee de la Poupée, right next to the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris.

Someone asked why are your dolls so expensive?

D: Well we use expensive fabrics, the fashions are labor intensive, and normally consist of multiple pieces, in small edition sizes. We don’t go in for economies of scale. It’s all in the detail -like all those safety pins we had made. For what you’re getting, they’re not expensive. We pay our factories decent rates, and we don’t exploit them.

For this reason there are no plans for a less expensive Sybarite diffusion range.

C: We wouldn’t be happy with it. Why would we give up our freedom? We try our best to keep costs down but we won’t compromise on fabric, finish, nor detail. If we had to make those compromises we’d be out of this business. We make the dolls for ourselves because we are collectors. The fact that other people buy them and like them is amazing, if no one bought them we would just make OOAKs all the time. We would still make them because it’s what we want as collectors. 

D: We have to be happy with what we do and we have made dolls in the past that not everybody had liked. But we still love those dolls and if we don’t believe in the product we couldn’t produce it. We adore Summer – she was a really edgy doll, and Moon as well. People who have bought those dolls tend to hang on to them and really love them. Summer definitely wasn’t a crowd-pleaser. Cosma Shiva was not liked at all, they hated her at first. 

Do you have particular favorite dolls?

C: The Sybarites!

D: It’s hard to choose. I have dolls that have been my absolute favorites, but… Cosma Shiva I love her, and Sureal I have a very soft spot for. I loved creating her outfit, and because she was our first production doll – you like them for different reasons not necessarily for how they turned out.

C: Everybody loves Pony. It’s so interesting that we didn’t see that coming. So whilst in China, I had a little free time in one of the factories, and that’s where Pony came from. We sampled an underwear set that was not produced – I thought let’s just cut it in nude leather, right OK – now let’s get a black wig, I actually thought her up on the spot, almost out of boredom. It’s like I have this time to spend and I might as well just sit in the factory and do development.

Pony is a beautiful doll and we’re big fans of that moment of inspiration. That’s why when things just happen we do them – we don’t think, ‘Oh, I didn’t plan to do that. We just stick ‘em in and see where it goes. And it works.’

C: Des has a wonderful OOAK doll called Valium, he had made her a black outfit for her trip to Paris. I was in China and asked him to email me the pattern for the skirt. I couldn’t do it in black because that was Valium’s so I did it in white.

D: Summer is one of those development dolls, and she looks like winter…

C: … and would be on sale in the summer – so that’s what I called her.

I left the Salon with my head spinning from all of their ideas. And the future? Well mere articulation could seem like old hat during the next few years, exciting plans are afoot for the Sybarites, the proposed developments for these dolls sound quite incredible – think Supereverything! As Charles says, “The day we stop believing is when we’ll start doing something else”.

This story first appeared in Haute Doll Magazine, 2009