It is quite a while since I showed you a doll sitting in her underwear waiting for me to make the rest of her clothes.
Here she is, dressed
turned out very glam, didn’t she?
The underwear is not removable, everything else is. Her bolero is made from an actual art deco mat which some patient person crocheted long ago.
I have a collection of antique bits and pieces, not much. My father. lifelong collector, used to find scraps for me when he ran his retirement business as a dealer. Long before that he brought me a real art deco beaded bag, which I did take out once. As it is a hundred years old it is fragile and now lives in a box. Although the doll in the photograph is thoroughly beaded, the beads are to modern taste. My bag is beaded with brown and orange beads with rather too much brown for today. I discovered early on that people do not like buying dolls dressed in brown.
Colours in clothing are an interesting topic. I think folk memory is at work in the distaste collectors have for brown. From the neolithic, when people wore brown fur or tanned leather, right through the early and late mediaeval periods when the majority of the population were mostly wearing mostly brown, the shade has had associations with poverty. Except for the exceptions,
which, in the twenties and thirties would certainly be mink. This lady is wearing a mink stole made from a fragment of the real thing, probably of a similar date.
The prestige of owning a mink garment lasted right through the war and up to the fifties. I had a cousin who was so determined to inherit my grandmother’s mink coat that she reminded our grandmother at every opportunity. I don’t know if she did eventually get the coat but she did marry someone nice and rich and could probably afford her own fur coat.
In the early eighties my parents gave me a rabbit fur gilet, which almost instantly I could not wear, as the anti fur movement took hold.
Our attitudes to this type of clothing are very interesting. My father, raised on the Boys Own Paper and all things Baden Powell was heavily invested in the noble boy pursuing the wild tiger and the man of the species covering the cave sleeping bench with the pelt of something he had hunted. I have written previously of Bertie Adams, who I loved.
Bertie Adams was a leopard skin rug with a stuffed head, glass eyes and a green felt scalloped edging. He got his name when I was a baby with big ears. One day my father tripped over his head, a frequent occurrence when the floor has a covering with a snarl, teeth and ears that stick up.
‘Oh!’ he exclaimed, ‘that damn’ at which point it was less the leopard’s ears he was aware of as mine, hence he finished, creatively ‘Bertie Adams.’ I loved Bertie Adams and talked to him frequently, he might have been the reason our cats at home were so well behaved. Sadly when starting his retirement business in antique dealing my father saw fit to put Bertie Adams in the window, and sold him.
I was as cut up as I would have been had he sold a family member, I thought Bertie Adams was a family member and had anticipated caring for his old age in my old age.
Of course the fur was always better on the living animal, as was every other body part. I have been vegetarian for a long time, though I do eat fish. I don’t know how long this will last. The latest news is that whales and sharks are trying to talk to us, we already know dolphins have a menopause to help them look after their grandchildren and if we find lobsters are philanthropic, I’m stuffed.
Meanwhile the doll is wearing a fragment of a fur at least a hundred years old. How much detail I bring to doll dressing that is authentic constantly interests me.
Clothing affects the way we are and the way we interact with the world, as does technology. I am so used to showering once or twice a day and putting clean clothes on I barely remember bath night once a week and the same blouse for school worn every day for a week and I don’t remember my winter school tweed coat ever being cleaned at all. Grown out of, yes, washed, no. I do recall my grandmother talking about washing the goodness out of things, which may have been making a virtue of necessity.
As we view the past through the screens of the present, dolls are only ever going to be an adaptation of history. My dolls, however, were never meant to be realistic looking miniature humans. They live doll lives in doll clothes and smile all the time. They hurt no one and only ever cheer people up.
I am so happy to be able to think of something that will make someone happy and then conjour it out of my head and into reality. If you thought that was art you wouldn’t get an argument out of me.
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