The Beautiful Doll

Is beauty only vinyl, resin, or porcelain deep? How have our perceptions of this elusive quality changed over time? We ponder polish and pulchritude.

Many collectors are interested in dolls as a way of recapturing their youth. Whether it’s by means of dolls from when they were young, or by collecting the latest runway looks with cutting edge dolls and fashions. Perhaps our dolls wear clothes that we would like to, but no longer have the inclination (or figure!) to do so.

While collectors in general recognize the obsessive nature of this hobby, doll collectors probably also accept that the beauty of our dolls is both a blessing and a curse. It’s true that these little depictions of fashion can never age in the way that their owners do, but it also means that their looks are frozen in time – forever mirroring the ideal look of the era when their designer made them. Rather than bestowing dolls with enduring beauty, the makers of the past have given us a bellwether of how our perception of this elusive quality changes over time. Standards of beauty as reflected by different periods and captured in plastic, celluloid, resin, porcelain, vinyl, rubber, or wood.

Victorian dolls had a distinctively fleshy quality compared with today’s fashion dolls. These porcelain beauties generally were big-eyed and cupid-lipped with heart-shaped (or weak-chinned!) faces. A winsome expression was called for, as well as a delicate natural complexion and rosy cheeks. The modern fashion doll divas, epitomized by the Sybarites, have a much haughtier demeanor, and chiseled features born of gym-toned bodies and a strict diet. ‘Natural’ is anathema to these dolls: make-up is liberally applied and heels are high. This has been the case since Barbie entered the fashion doll arena in 1959, and with her the look of innocence was forever banished from the world of fashion dolls.

Body-shape, however, has hardly ever been natural. The Victorian French fashion dolls were corseted and bustled, trussed up to the same degree endured by their human counterparts. It wasn’t until Coco Chanel liberated women from the constraints of these restrictive undergarments and popularized a sporty, more athletic physique that a new feminine ideal was adopted in the post-World War I era. It is perhaps no coincidence more accessible looks and play value were captured by the French doll, Bleuette in the first half of the twentieth century were.

Chanel was also responsible for the tanning craze, in tune with her more outdoorsy mood. Before this a tanned complexion was seen as strictly working class: the upper classes took great care to stay out of the sun for fear of sullying their milky white complexions and being mistaken for farm laborers. In Elizabethan times it was not uncommon for fine ladies to paint blue veins on their temples as a demonstration of the delicacy of their skin. Luckily in these more enlightened times of diversity all of this nonsense has stopped! Which is not to say we haven’t found other fashion ridiculousness of our own.

And just to show that dolls and beauty have always been at the forefront of modern thinking, from Victorian times to today:

“Beauty is given to dolls, majesty to haughty vixens, but mind, feeling, passion and the crowning grace of fortitude are the attributes of an angel.

Charlotte Brontë, Tales of Angria

“I think they should have a Barbie with a buzz cut.

Ellen DeGeneres

This story first appeared in Fashion Doll Quarterly magazine, 2015