The majority of garments from this earlier date remain associated with fully dressed
dolls, and are complicated by the ambiguity of the definition of child’s play doll and
fashion doll. Sometimes known as a Pandora, mannequin, or poupée, fashion dolls have been interpreted by historians as marketing ploys to manipulate the fashion
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market.56 Meanwhile, those working more specifically on dolls have insisted on
demarcating their studies from fashion and dress scholarship, stating that many dolls
were ‘made solely as luxury toys’.57 This demarcation is in many ways artificial and
misleading. Historians and curators struggle to tell them apart, leading to confused indexing. However, the objects themselves often crossed over this boundary of material identity.58 Once they had fulfilled their use as disseminators of dress, fashion
dolls could quite conceivably be passed on to children as toys, evidence of which will
be explored in the following case studies. Consequently, in many cases, the object’s
afterlife has become caught up with its original purpose, making it difficult to understand the complexities of these objects. Instead of attempting the futile task of
defining categorisations of what is and is not a fashion or child’s toy doll, I take a more
inclusive view. On the one hand, the fashion doll was a commodity of the clothing trade, providing an official and regimented source of fashion dissemination.59
However, the toy doll can also be considered a fashion doll, in that it was a tool through which girls and women could practice and develop practical sewing skills and fashion knowledge.60 In both cases, it was a tool for material literacy.
Fashion dolls, which were produced for adult female consumers, held similar didactic and mimetic qualities, and it is useful to compare the two similar media and their influence on the female consumer through the life cycle. Adult fashion dolls were sometimes smaller, such as those previously examined, however evidence suggests
56 Max von Boehn, Dolls, trans. Josephine Nicoll (New York: Dover, 1972); Madeleine Ginsburg, An Introduction to Fashion Illustration (London: V&A, 1980), p. 6; McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb,
Birth of a Consumer Society, pp. 43–46; Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 474; Juliette Peers, The Fashion Doll: From Bébé Jumeau to Barbie (London: Berg, 2004).
57 Kay Desmonde, Dolls (London: Littlehampton, 1972), p. 12. 58 Peers, Fashion Doll, p. 3.
59 McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 43. 60 Peers, Fashion Doll, pp. 1-41.
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that life-sized dolls also existed. Extant examples of these are rare, and research for this study has brought to light only one (Figures 3.6 and 3.7).61 The doll is constructed
from painted wood, and revolves on a central iron pole. She is dressed in a silk brocade gown, which matches the painted shoes on the mannequin. She also wears a wig, pearl earrings, paste buckles, and a ribbon necklace. The experience of interacting with this doll would be quite different to that of viewing the smaller dolls. It provided an opportunity to admire and scrutinize an artificial paragon of femininity.62 The action
of viewing such dolls has been interpreted as a desire to transform the self into the doll, and to be admired just as the doll is.63 Indeed, such terminology was used to
describe women, such as Lady Harcourt who was hailed as the ‘finest Doll’, implying a mimetic connection between woman and doll, and the terminology of ‘doll’ being
seen as a byword for aesthetic female perfection.64
These dolls can certainly be interpreted as artificial portrayals of feminine ideals, however this should not cause the historian to overlook the role of these dolls as an educational tool, allowing mimickery, inspiration, and re-interpretation. In spite of satirical comments to the contrary, it was certainly not the case that the drawing rooms of the beau monde were filled with identically dressed women. Similarly, although evidence regarding exactly who viewed these dolls is lacking, it is unlikely that all who saw them could afford such garments, nor that they would fit other
61 This doll also appeared in the Silent Partners exhibition, held at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
14th October 2014 – 25th January 2015. See Jane Munro, Alyce Mahon, and Sally Woodcock, Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 39.
62 That a similar commercial tool does not appear to have existed for male fashion is noteworthy.
Although male dolls do exist, they appear to have been almost certainly for purposes of play and display. See: Lord Clapham, 1690-1700, VAM, T.847-1974.
63 Julie Park, The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2010), p. 108.
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priorities, such as age, colouring, or personal taste. Neil McKendrick has claimed that these full sized mannequins allowed for the garments to be immediately tried on by customers.65 Furthermore, an advertisement from 1799 stated that customers might view items worn by dolls ‘by a trial on themselves’.66 The important factor here is not
that customers were manipulated by the doll as a marketing tool, but rather that they enabled personal education, which in turn facilitated choice and agency in engaging with the product on a material level, physically interacting with it. This haptic interaction mirrors the priorities evident in interactions with children’s dolls,
indicating the continuing didactic properties of the doll throughout the lifecycle, and the importance of ongoing material literacy.
Although we can state with some certainty that the full-sized dolls were intended as dissemination and marketing tools for adult consumers, the purpose and use of smaller dolls is contentious. The fluidity of the identity of extant dolls is evident in a doll from the Victoria and Albert Museum, which curators have traditionally classified as a fashion doll (Figure 3.8). The doll itself is a turned wooden doll, with carved lower arms and jointed legs, human hair, and a gessoed face. She wears a silk gown trimmed with gilt braid, cap, mittens, stomacher, shift, stays, three petticoats, a pocket, stockings, shoes, and a fob watch. She measures approximately 60cm in height. Her jointed arms and legs coincide with a rare description of a fashion doll by Horace Walpole in 1793 as a ‘jointed baby’.67 From this information, it proves difficult
to ascertain her purpose. A more specific clue lies in the marks and inscriptions on the
doll. Specifically, the watch fob carried by the doll bears the inscription ‘Eliz. Bootle,
65 McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 45.
66 ‘Advertisement for Trichomato-Parastasis’, Oracle and Daily Advertiser, January 1799; ‘Advertisement for Ross’s’, Morning Post, February 1800.
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London’. The provenance of the doll is that it came from the Loveday family, who
were friends and cousins of Mary and Robert Bootle, who married in the 1750s, and had a daughter called Elizabeth in the late 1760s.68 Given the dating of the doll, it
therefore seems probable that it was created as a fashion doll, which was then given to a child five to ten years after its original use.
Figure 3.6. Mannequin, 1765, 175cm, Pelham Galleries, Paris.
68 Charles Mosley, ed., Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage (3 vols, Delaware: Burke’s
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Figure 3.8. Fashion Doll, 1755-1760, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, T.90 to V-1980.
The confusion over the original purpose of the doll is not the most important factor when engaging with this object. Having established that, at least for some portion of its life, this doll belonged to a young girl with aristocratic connections, is
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more significant. This doll continued to act as a fashion educator, which the owner could examine, dress and undress, and potentially create new garments for.69 These
dolls were the dynamic possessions of girls learning how to be women. As we have already seen, it is likely that the watch fob was added, or at least adapted, later in this
doll’s life. Crucially, even if the fashions became outdated, this doll was still able to
act as a material educator, passively informing the child how women’s clothes felt,
moved, were made and were worn. This knowledge – key to understanding dress, fabrics, and cut, rather than the sweeping trends of fashion – was the focus here. This information could then be transposed to interactions with full-sized garments as the child developed as a consumer.
The mimetic quality of dolls has been well established. Young girls were encouraged to practice their adult role of mother, with the doll taking the part of the
child. In Dorothy Kilner’s The Doll’s Spelling Book of 1802, the author encourages
readers to be ‘anxious for the welfare of your dear little families, whether they are composed of Wax, Wood, Leather or Rag’.70 This conflation of feminine identity and
motherhood, and of girl and woman, again reflect the notion of learning through doing,
which was evident in the doll’s clothes previously examined. Throughout The Doll’s Spelling Book, the character of the girl teaches the doll, mirroring the configuration of mother teaching child. This was enacted through play and imagination, and the creating of imaginary conversations:
69 Peers, Fashion Doll, p. 20.
70 Dorothy Kilner, The Doll’s Spelling Book: Intended as an Assistant to Their Mammas in the Difficult Undertaking of Teaching Dolls to Read (London: J. Marshall, 1802), pp. v-vi.
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MAM-MA:…Come, my dear doll, though you can not talk, I will make-be- lieve that you can. So come, my child, sit in my lap, and tell me if you know what you are made of?
DOLL: I am made of paper.
MAM-MA: Oh you sil-ly thing! Do you not know bet-ter than that? You are made of wood.71
The girl, in the role of ‘Mam-ma’, trains for her future role through teaching the doll- baby lessons she is herself in the process of learning. She teaches her to read, and provides moral lessons and tales. Importantly, there is again a significant focus on the development of material literacy and an awareness of the physical world, seen in the quote above, through the emphasis on what the doll is made of. This is extended through a description of the wax, which the doll is made of, and an explanation of the
processes behind its manufacture. Again, the child’s development and preparation for
their adult role includes a significant degree of knowledge of manufacture, materials, and making. This knowledge is developed both through practical enactment of skills, but also through play. Play as a device was widely used to acquaint children with the world they inhabited, and this pedagogical practice has been widely commented upon.72
71 Ibid., pp. 39-40.
72 McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, pp. 286-315; O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child, p. 108.
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