From a bespoke ballet to the windows of Barneys New York (via luminaries such as Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington): the Kouklitas are fashion’s hot dolls and their designer, Andrew Yang, is in great demand. The Bold Doll catches up with this couturier of international repute between flights!
Andrew Yang is a man of many facets. As well as being a model, a dancer, and a photographer – he has more recently shot to fame as craftsman of the 27” couture fashion rag dolls he calls Kouklitas. The name originates from the Greek word for doll, koukla. Each doll is cut from a pattern, sewn into muslin, and meticulously stuffed and attached by hand. The faces are all hand painted, and the dresses are created using luxurious fabrics and couture sewing methods.
Yang spent his childhood in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he grew up around his mother’s collection of dolls and eventually acquired his own collection of high-end fashion dolls. His hobby was put on hold when he moved to New York to pursue fashion, an industry he worked in as an assistant designer for several years. Longing for another creative outlet, Yang created his first doll from scraps of muslin in the summer of 2008, as he explains:
“I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember, and my parents did as much as they could to supplement my art education outside of what the public school system had to offer. I spent several summers enrolled in various painting, sculpture, stained glass, and sewing classes. My mother had a porcelain doll that she cast herself, a little group of Madame Alexander dolls, and a few traditional Korean and Japanese dolls. The queen of her collection was a Sweet Sue Sophisticate. Even though I couldn’t ‘play’ with her dolls, I was lucky my parents indulged me enough to let me get old barbie dolls from thrift stores, as well as Cabbage Patch kids and My Little Ponies.”
“One of my favorite toys growing up was a large white muslin rabbit bought from a craft store. She must have been over two feet tall. I loved dressing her up, and tying her long floppy ears into bows. She could wear my sister’s old frilly baby dresses, and I could pose her any which way, if only for a few moments. I experimented a lot with making clothes for her with scraps of fabric and a pair of scissors, I couldn’t have been more than ten at the time. I didn’t create any dolls while I was very young – I think my capabilities often fell short of my visions.
It wasn’t until I had moved to New York, and had years of pattern making and design experience that I had the confidence to create a doll. I didn’t want to take the time to learn how to cast sculpted work, so I used the medium I had mastered in my craft – fabric. I literally sketched out a doll onto pattern paper, used it as the pattern, and figured it out. I couldn’t find any fiberfill in Manhattan at the time, so I used expensive lambs wool from my job as an assistant designer at a luxury fur and ready-to-wear company, combined with the innards of an unfortunate Valentine’s Day horse from a local drug store. I painted on her face with ink and watercolor pencil, and made a wig from a scrap of Mongolian lambswool. My current pattern from the Kouklita hasn’t deviated that much from this original design.”
When starting on a new doll Yang usually thinks of fabric combinations or of historical costume references that would make an amazing dress. He is inspired by figures from movies or fashion, but for the most part he likes his dolls to examine different aspects of beauty, “I love taking something like the idea of a cyclops and making her beautiful and cuddly.”
Many of the Kouklitas are individual commissions where a client has an idea for a gown, an outfit, or for a specific person; they bounce back and forth with questions about hair and makeup and facial expression and then ultimately a sketch is created. Yang will notify the client if any changes happen between the sketch and the final doll. As he says, “I’ve been lucky in the light that all of my clients leave me with a large amount of creative liberty.” (Check out the website, astoryang.com/shop, for Kouklitas versions of Grace Coddington and Anna Wintour.)
Pressed to choose which doll the designer has especially enjoyed working on, he is engagingly diplomatic, “All of them! I know it’s a really democratic answer, but it really is true. If I don’t enjoy working on her, she usually never gets finished.”
As well as making dolls, Yang is a doll collector, too – although this has been put on hold of late as he concentrates on his own creations. “I was a serious Fashion Royalty, Silkstone, and Gene collector for several years. I used to salivate over the Candi repaints Jason Wu did long before he was with Integrity. I have almost all of the early Silkstones, although they are still packed away at my parent’s place in Salt Lake City. Robert Best and I actually attended the same high school! After I started making dolls, my collecting habits took a 180 degree turn; I started accumulating a large collection of antique doll parts, Furga dolls from the sixties, boudoir dolls, and traditional dolls from around the world. Basically anything weird and unique.”
“I’m a big fan of Marina Bychkova’s Enchanted Doll. Lately I have fallen in love with Ellowyne Wilde – especially since they’ve started utilizing inset eyes. I would love to collaborate with Tonner on the Ellowyne line somehow – I’ve fantasized about a Wilde family tree, with dozens of Ellowynes in bustles, period dress, and Marie Antoinette wigs. For now I’ll just make them for myself. Tonner has done a great job of carrying the traditional fashion doll flame without venturing too closely into Barbie territory – I think his dolls will be looked back on as the Cissys and Revlon girls of our era.”
“My own work is always full of surprises. When I’m handling a big order of fashion dolls, there are always a few looks that I dread recreating in Kouklita size. After I finish them I always wonder why I was dreading it, and sometimes they turn out to be my favorite. I always end up making a few dolls that I have a really hard time parting with, and there are others who I make that seem like the bitchy girlfriends of my favorite dolls and I can’t wait to see them go. And then there is the occasional doll that somehow exists in a state of purgatory – I created her with no particular intention, and I can end up chopping, redressing, and re-wigging her dozens of times before she is ‘done.’ I still have a handful of dolls from the first set that are still in process.”
According to Yang there is no such thing as a typical Kouklitas customer. “A lot of them are ‘fashion aware’ doll collectors. And I’ve managed to convert a few die-hard fashion lovers into doll collectors. One woman bought sixteen of my dolls at retail from Barneys! My other collectors are art doll lovers and art collectors. I have yet to have a customer who wants to aggressively redress and customize my work, even though that was where I initially thought my market would lie.”
The Kouklitas are exquisitely crafted with beautiful fabrics, sourced for ideal scale, period accuracy and appropriate bulk. “It’s the most difficult part of the process. I like to use mostly luxury silks, cottons, fur, and leather, so that’s my first limitation. When I run into issues with scale, I try to find something that evokes the same response as the original print. I think about the dolls like 3D fashion illustrations when interpreting fashion looks. Sometimes all a fashion illustration consists of is a wisp of color and some black ink – so I think about what the essence of the look is and emphasize it, be it the draping, color, or texture. Aside from sourcing the right materials, one of my other main challenges with the dolls is letting them go!”
“The first collection of dolls I produced was made to be completely redressed, with snaps, hooks and eyes, and zippers. I was working on them from the point of view of a doll collector, and that’s how I like to play with my dolls. I actually designed the dresses in such a way that you could swap out skirts and petticoats and have multiple outfits in one. Then I realized that the majority of my customers weren’t interested in redressing them. Because they are all handmade, they walk a fine line between being a doll and a work of art. All of the fashion dolls that I sell through Barneys, Joyce, Showstudio, and the gallery dolls, end up as not re-dressable dolls. When I work on a custom basis, I offer the client the option of making the dolls re-dressable. I am developing a slightly smaller, more affordable Kouklita that is limited edition and re-dressable, but still looking for the right manufacturer for such an endeavor.”
Every part of each Kouklitas doll is selected with care using materials painstakingly researched by Yang himself. He explains about the choice of hair for the dolls and how it’s attached (clearly very well, if you view the ballet sequence video on his web site!): “The hair is chosen on a case-by-case basis. I decide what hair works for what doll, and if it’s acrylic or mohair. I like the acrylic hair because it is easily brushed and styled, something that is one of my favorite things to do on a doll. I end up making most of the wigs by sewing wefts of hair onto the right color netting. The center of the wig is attached with an industrial rubber cement, and then sewn by hand around the hairline.”
Each doll has a high fashion quality and yet possesses an organic form. They hark back to some of the earliest dolls, made centuries ago, so they have both ancient and highly contemporary qualities. He comments on this thought, “Dolls, puppets, and human figures have been around since the dawn of mankind as we know it. You could argue that the fact we make miniature versions of ourselves is one of the things that defines us as ‘human.’ Pandora dolls were tall wooden statuettes dressed in the latest fashions from Europe, a tradition that spanned hundreds of years from the middle ages to the industrial revolution. They used to cross war-torn borders to the hands of the queens of Russia, Germany, France, England, and Italy, and were sometimes stolen and fought over. I like to think of my fashion Kouklitas as continuing the Pandora tradition in a modern sense, little time capsules of where we are right now in clothing, something more special than an editorial in a fashion magazine where an outfit is forgotten as soon as the next issue comes out.”
There are plenty of exciting developments coming up for Yang. He’s currently developing a ball jointed doll with artist Joshua David McKenney (of Pidgin Doll) for potential manufacturers and there will be more collaborations with exclusive fashion retailers. Plans for creating another short film with the dolls are underway – part video fashion art and part luxury doll commercial. As Yang and I spoke he was on his way to meetings in China where he has been asked not only to create a range of dolls for a design house in Guangzhou, but also to oversee art direction for a major new theme park. It seems as if we’ll be hearing a lot more about the talented Andrew Yang in the coming months, and deservedly so!
Yang’s work has been featured in Vogue, the New York Times, and international publications of Elle, Marie Claire, and Harpers Bazaar. To find out more about the Kouklitas visit astoryang.com/shop and see his latest dolls at www.astoryang.com
This feature first appeared in Fashion Doll Quarterly magazine in 2011.
- Andrew (Yuan-Du) Yang is an American artist, creative director and entrepreneur. He co-founded the film and production company SWOON NYC. Yang is presently living and working in Los Angeles, California.
- Yang was born in Orem, Utah, and raised in Salt Lake City as the second oldest of seven children in a Mormon household. His father, Chun-hui Yang, is from Taipei. His mother, Frances Yang, the eldest grand-daughter of film actress Mary Astor, was born and raised in Santa Monica, California. He attended New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology where he completed a degree in womenswear design and interned for Proenza Schouler.
- In 2006, Yang joined the design team of Dennis Basso based in New York City. For several years, he also worked as an art and fashion model, beginning collaboration with photographers Gigi Stoll and Jessica Yatrofsky.
- In 2008, Yang created his first doll, and with it launched his first brand, The Kouklitas. Following this collection, he was commissioned by stylist James Worthington Demolet to create several looks from Spring 2010 RTW collections for The Block magazine. Photographed by Dan Forbes, the editorial went viral. This led to a commission celebrating Joyce Boutique Hong Kong’s 40th anniversary with windows in the flagship Hong Kong and Shanghai stores, as well as the publication together with Susan Locht of his first book “The Kouklitas”.
- Anna Wintour recommended Yang create 200 dolls for Fashion’s Night Out with Barney’s New York. The artist also created two dolls auctioned off for charity in the likeness of Wintour and editor Grace Coddington. Following this Yang collaborated with Frankie Morello Milan, Showstudio London, and a charity collaboration with Chinese brand Mo & Co de Paris.
- It was during this time that Yang co-founded film and production company SWOON NYC with director Ramon Goni, and co-created the award winning short film “Swoon Éphémère” as well as several other streams of related content.
- In 2011 Yang was first American artist invited to design all of the puppets and creative direct the prestigious Galeries Lafayette Christmas windows in Paris France. This was followed by a collaboration with Lancome Paris. Music star Beyoncé featured one of his Barneys dolls in a 2011 concert video, and Lady Gaga, Oprah, Danielle Steel, Ricardo Tisci, Thom Browne, and Azzedine Alaia all own his work.
- Returning to New York Yang developed the iDollogy character franchise with Cristina Carlino, creating a revolutionary stop motion animation music video with Cuppa Coffee Studios. Following this Yang joined forces with Daniel Randell. Together they created and produced a spring campaign for Japan’s department store, Hankyu Osaka, as well as holiday installation for the Hong Kong department store, Elements, Hong Kong.
- In 2015 Yang and Randell relocated to Hollywood, California where they began working on creating a collection of dolls with Sideshow Collectibles based off the likeness of classic Warner Brothers characters and other celebrities.
- In 2018 Yang released a collection of dolls likeness of his Great-Grandmother, Mary Astor, with Tonner Doll Company.