Why Dolls Are a Perennial Fashion Inspiration

Style Points is a weekly column about how fashion intersects with the wider world.

American Girl dolls are starring in memes. A Barbie sequel could be headed our way, though the Lena Dunham-penned Polly Pocket movie has sadly bitten the dust. Adults are embracing dollhouses again. Olivia Rodrigo has been reviving the babydoll dress silhouette while promoting her recent album, with the attendant internet controversy. And designers like Sandy Liang are bringing doll-like silhouettes, complete with winsome bows, to the runway.

If it seems like dolls are having a fashion moment, they are, but it’s certainly not their first. As early as the late 14th century, members of the European courts would exchange intricately kitted-out dolls as a way to give a three-dimensional view of what they were wearing. (Call it the original OOTD.)

I’ve retained this piece of trivia thanks to Dr. Colleen Hill, the senior curator of costume at MFIT. Hill, who is also the curator of the museum’s upcoming exhibit “Doll Dressing,” explains that the dolls in question may “look like toys, but they weren’t. They were meant for grown women to exchange fashion ideas.”

Today, many designers are eager to reconnect with the toy-box denizens who were their introduction to fashion, whether that was paper dolls or Barbies. They are also a way for designers to tap into a childlike sense of play. (Think of Jonathan Anderson’s quarantine-era spring 2021 collection, for which he mailed editors a “show in a box” featuring paper-doll-style cutouts of each look.)

In the exhibit, which opens September 16, runway examples include pieces from Martin Margiela’s fall/winter 1994 collection, where he famously blew up Ken, Barbie, and G.I. Joe clothes and accessories to 5.2 times their original size, and Prada’s trompe l’oeil doll boots from fall 2011. During his time at Moschino, Jeremy Scott experimented with doll motifs regularly, even turning models into life-size paper dolls for his spring/summer 2017 collection. And fashion perhaps has no bigger doll aficionado than Anna Sui, who has long worked her childhood love of dolls into her work. She was even immortalized with her own signature Barbie last year.

Big-name dolls also get their due in the exhibit. For the purposes of the show, Hill says, the American Girl cohort was deemed more history- than fashion-oriented—though anyone whose sense of style was deeply shaped by Samantha Parkington might beg to differ. But Barbie plays as big a part as you might expect. (Hill tells me that the doll’s creators estimate that she’s worn over one billion outfits since she was introduced in 1959.) Also in the mix is the big-eyed, delightfully weird Blythe doll, beloved by designers like Sui and Alexander McQueen (the latter “cast” the dolls in his Target collaboration campaign circa 2009).

The playfulness of dolls isn’t the only focus of the exhibition. One section, titled “Broken Dolls,” looks at their role in horror, the kinderwhore movement, and the work of Hans Bellmer, the German artist who explored the more sinister side of dolls. (There’s a fashion link there too: The runway’s Goth prince Olivier Theyskens printed Bellmer’s work onto pieces in his spring/summer 2019 collection.) “I’m kind of tucking it away because obviously it can be a little sensitive for certain audiences, but I felt it was nonetheless really important to include,” Hill says of this corner of the show, adding, “I have a friend who won’t come see the show because she’s actively scared of dolls. She’s like, ‘I think it’s a great idea. I just can’t go.’”

Hill also looks to women like Courtney Love, Kat Bjelland of Babes in Toyland, and KatieJane Garside of Daisy Chainsaw, who pioneered so-called kinderwhore style, which germinated in the grunge era and still reverberates today. The aesthetic combined whimsical, childlike staples, like babydoll dresses, barrettes, and Peter Pan collars, with punk-influenced ripped tights and ruined makeup. While it was once considered a relic of ’90s riot grrrl, it has gained new relevance with the furor over Olivia Rodrigo adopting the look. “These women [in the ’90s] really deftly combined conventional beauty and irreverence,” Hill says. “And the idea that you can essentially dress in this infantilizing way because you’re saying, ‘No, that’s your problem if you’re reading it that way, not mine,’ is something that has come up again in popular culture.” As the Rodrigo conversation unfolded online, “I was following those comments very closely. And for every person who was saying, ‘Well, she shouldn’t be dressing like that,’ there were 20 other women coming to her defense saying, ‘She should dress however she wants,’” Hill says.

Among the pieces Hill is proudest of is a loan from the Museum of the City of New York, of an adult-sized ensemble and a miniature matching doll. They were created by Ruby Bailey, who owned a dressmaking shop in Harlem. In the 1960s, “she started creating these dolls, first by altering Barbie dolls. She would change their skin color to a darker skin tone, and would often add natural hair because she felt that expressed her Afrocentric pride,” Hill explains. “She would eventually come to create these dolls that were entirely her own, these interesting soft sculpture dolls. They kind of hardened over time. But they’re beautifully posed and they’re wearing miniature versions of her clothes. At this point they’re kind of fragile, but I think they’re really beautiful examples of someone who was creating these one-of-a-kind dolls.”

In a world where we’re torn between seeing dolls as whimsical celebrations of girlhood and expressions of the constraints women are under, Hill says she has given a lot of thought to how the show will be interpreted by its viewers, “particularly since it’s so focused on women, and in some cases, the idea of the woman as a living doll. What does that mean? And again, can it be very infantilizing or regressive or vapid? Of course you can interpret any of these looks like that,” she says. “But overarchingly, I’ve found that the idea of doll dressing is really positive. I think it fosters playfulness and self-acceptance and imagination. And it also offers a bit of a reprieve from all of the pressures of adulthood.” Which is something we could all use right now, regardless of age.