Fashion Dolls: A short history
Fig. 1 Master of the St George’s Guild, 1502. Isabella of Austria with doll, detail from Archduke Charles, the later Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, with his sisters Eleonore and Isabella at the age of 2 years. Wood, 31.5 x 14cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum © KHM-Museumsverband.
‘The source and origin of all the pretty fashion in Italy’ is just one of the many descriptors of Isabella d’Este, whose flair for innovative fashion spread beyond the borders of Italy [1]. Her style was disseminated through Europe via fashion dolls and we are able to gain some insight into how the dolls were dressed in a letter dated 19 November 1515 from Isabella’s son Federico Gonzaga:
My Illustrious and Exalted Lady, Most Revered Mother and Lady, Monsignor de Moretta has told me that the King wishes My Lady to send him a doll dressed in the fashions that you wear with under gowns, sleeves, underdresses, overdresses and coats, and headdresses and hairstyles that you wear; sending various headdress styles would better suit his majesty, for he intends to have some of these garments made to give the ladies of his court. Therefore would you be so kind to send this as soon as possible [2].
The dolls, often sent as diplomatic gifts, were eagerly awaited and much favoured, discussed and valued in the courts. In many instances, they were added to the recipients’ cabinet of curiosity or wunderkammer, along with other exotic objects [3]. Their advertising properties proved invaluable in a way mere description could not.
The dolls were used not only to showcase the current fashions and exquisite fabrics, but to demonstrate the remarkable craftsmanship of the textile designer, the dyer, the weaver, the seamstress and the tailor. Of equal importance was the way in which the tactile qualities could be experienced firsthand. Imagine feeling the softness of newly invented velvets, silk gently brushing the skin, the joyous rustle of taffeta. These magnificent fabrics, made into miniature garments with fashionable sleeves, marvellously puffed or contrasting fabric bursting out of slashed fabric; figure-hugging bodices embroidered with a myriad of happy flowers and tiny bugs; borders patterned in gold and silver rippling round the hem of a skirt. All these could be replicated to grace the bodies of the wealthy women who would wear them.
The evolution of these dolls is, however, somewhat of an enigma. Perhaps they derived from creche dolls popular during the Middle Ages, or perhaps they came about by chance [4]. Other European countries as well as Sweden, the United Kingdom and Scotland simultaneously employed fashion dolls to promote and share their fashions and craftsmanship. The dolls were known variously as: pupe (German), puve (Italian), fashion babies (English), poupines (old French), and pippens (Scots). By the seventeenth century they were known as pandoras, which comes from the Greek meaning ‘all gifts’, and to the fashion conscious they were indeed gifts.
In 1396 an account for 459 francs was raised by Robert de Verennes, court tailor to Charles VI (1368-1422). The account was for dolls and their wardrobes, requested by Queen Isabeau of Bavaria, for the Queen of England. Her name is not mentioned, but she is thought to have been Isabeau’s young daughter, seven-year-old Isabella, and the doll was a gift to her on her marriage to King Richard II. Researchers, though, aren’t in agreement about the doll’s purpose – was it simply a gift, albeit a very expensive one, to the young Queen of England, or was it a fashion doll [5]?
Fig. 2 British School, 1577. Lady Arabella Stuart, later Duchess of Somerset (1575 – 1615), aged 23 months. Oil on panel transferred to canvas, 75.1 x 61.5cm. Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, NT1129175 © National Trust.
Another letter dated September 10, 1460, does indicate that dolls, specifically fashion dolls, were in circulation for the purpose of political gifting, when Ludovico Gonzaga wrote to his wife Barbara asking her to have ‘a doll made right away, dressed according to the fashion of Mantua in the gown and in the hair’ [6].
Although there is evidence of professional doll makers in the fourteenth century it is uncertain if these were the dolls used as fashion dolls. There are, however, descriptions as to the size and how some of the dolls were made, ‘ranging from a little over a foot tall to life-size, with torsos of cloth, leather or wood, and heads of wood, fabric, wax or porcelain …’[7]. The size of the dolls varied from small to large; occasionally, as seen above, the actual measurement is given. An inventory of Henry VII (1509-1547) mentions two sets of ‘babies’ in boxes, thought to have been fashion dolls, dressed in silk, satin and velvet, which gives the size as ‘grete’ and ‘little’. The ‘grete babie’, was dressed in ‘a gown of white clothe of silver and a kirtle of greane velvet the gowne tied with small aglets of golde with a small paier of beades of gold and a small Cheyne and a collar abowte the neck of golde’. While the other box contained ‘two little babies’, one dressed in ‘a gowne of crimsem satten and th’other a gowne of white velvet’ [8].
There are few extant female fashion dolls from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although dolls that are thought to have been fashion dolls, can be seen in paintings from the same period. Interestingly, though, male fashion dolls from this time aren’t mentioned, which is surprising considering men were as enthusiastic about the current fashions as women. It is thought that once the doll’s outfit was no longer fashionable, they were passed on to children as playthings [9]. Two of the dolls that may have been fashion dolls can be seen in two sixteenth-century paintings, Archduke Charles, the later Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, with his sisters Eleonore and Isabella at the age of 2 years (Fig. 1, 1502) and Lady Arabella Stuart, later Duchess of Somerset (1575 – 1615), aged 23 months (Fig. 2, 1577). Arabella Stewart’s doll is dressed in the fashion of preceding decades, while Isabella holds a doll who wears dress that is more contemporary.
From Federico’s letter to his mother in 1515 we have an idea of how the dolls may have been clothed, but one of the few extant dolls from Sweden, dated circa 1585-90, shows first-hand how the doll was made (Fig. 3). From descriptions we have of other dolls, the Swedish counterpart is somewhat different in construction than her European sisters.
Fig. 3 Fashion doll?, ca. 1590s. Stockholm, Livrustkammaren, 77 (56:15) 260 © Göran Schmidt/Livrustkammaren (CC BY-SA).
The doll is thought to have belonged to Princess Katarina, daughter of Karl IX of Sweden. She is fifteen centimetres tall and has human hair decorated with pearls. Her body and legs are made of wire wrapped in skin-coloured silk thread, her facial features embroidered in silk thread. Her purple silk gown is decorated with gold lace; the sleeves, now faded, are red silk embroidered with gold thread and pearls. She holds a muff embroidered in gold and silver satin stitch and a four-sided stitch in red silk. Beneath the skirt are two petticoats, the first is made from cut and uncut silk velvet, which is decorated with silver lace. The second is made from pink taffeta decorated in gold lace; both gown and petticoats are lined [10].
From the sixteenth century the fashion doll’s popularity grew. They visited royal households across Europe and Great Britain, Northern Europe and eventually crossed the sea to the United States of America [11]. But by the late eighteenth century, with the advent of fashion magazines, their popularity waned, and these delightful emissaries of fashion stopped travelling the world.
Margot Yeomans
Notes
[1] ^ Margaux Baum and Margaret Scott, Fashion and Clothing (New York: Rosen Publishing Group, 2016), 51.
[2] ^ Attraversando in il Rinascimento Italiano, "What is Happening in the Sweat Shop: Fashion Doll," accessed 17 June 2020, https://francadonato.weebly.com/future-projects/fashion-doll, 6.
[3] ^ Michael Pearce, "Edinburgh Castle: The Dolls of Mary Queen of Scots,” accessed 5 February 2019, https://www.historicenvironment.scot/archives-and-research/publications/publication/?publicationid=b78493b8-3cf3-4b47-a7c2-a9eb00f39ad1, 12.
[4] ^ Lydia Maria Taylor, “Pandora in the Box: travelling the World in the Name of Fashion,” accessed 3 June 2020, https://www.academia.edu/1751676/Pandora-_in_the_Box_Travelling_the_World_in_the_Name_of_Fashion, 2.
[5] ^ Max von Boehn, An Illustrated Guide to the Doll as Used in Fashion, (Redditch, UK: Read Books Ltd., 2011).
[6] ^ Jill Condra, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Clothing Through World History: 1501 – 1800, (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008), 23.
[7] ^ Ann Mauger Colbert, Kathleen M. Rassuli and Laura Farlow Dix, “Marketers, Dolls and the Democratization of Fashion," Proceedings of the Biennial Conference on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing 8, (1997): 114, available at https://ojs.library.carleton.ca/index.php/pcharm/issue/view/107
[8] ^ Pearce, "The Dolls of Mary, Queen of Scots," 12.
[9] ^ Yassana C. Croizat, “’Living dolls’: Francois 1er Dresses his Women," Renaissance Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2007): 94-130.
[10] ^ Isis’ Wardrobe, “Meet Pandora, a Fashion Doll of 1600,” accessed 12 June 2020, http://isiswardrobe.blogspot.com/2013/09/meet-pandora-fashion-doll-of-1600.html. The doll is housed in the Livrustkammaren, Stockholm.
[11] ^ Taylor, "Pandora in the Box," 1.
Jessica O’Leary