a history of paper dolls
GET TO KNOW THE HISTORY OF THE PAPER DOLL, HISTORY’S FLATTEST (BUT LOVELIEST) TOY.
Paper dolls are kind of magic. After all, it takes pure imagination to play dress-ups with a two-dimensional drawing, yet kids and adults have snipped and folded them for more than 250 years. Papercraft has many traditions – Japanese origami; Balinese shadow puppets; Polish wycinanki scissorcraft; and pantin, the satirical jumping jacks of 18th-century France – but there’s an important difference: none of them come with fabulous matching clothes and accessories.
The first step of playing with a paper doll is to snip your underwear-clad figure free from its paper prison. (Some have separate pin-on heads, arms and legs to make them easier to pose.) Then, carefully cut out their two-dimensional wardrobe and attach the garments neatly using handy fold-over tabs. Don’t rush, though – it takes dexterity to cut around the tiny silhouettes, and you don’t want to accidentally give the doll an unexpected haircut or bout of liposuction.
In their earliest days, paper dolls were fashion tools for grown women – almost like virtual fitting rooms. In the 1780s, wealthy ladies ‘tried on’ the latest styles by dressing miniature sketches of themselves in outfits cut from magazines. (At this time, the get-ups were held together with sealing wax.) And yet, ironically, as kids caught on to the craft-based toys, they became a cautionary tale against vanity. London-made ‘Little Fanny’ (created in 1810) and Boston-born ‘Little Henry’ (launched in 1812) matched with moralistic storybooks that shamed their well-to-do child heroes for valuing clothes.
Nevertheless, children became infatuated with the 2D dolls and their boundless creativity, and soon enough, they were popping up everywhere from books and newspapers to magazines and ads. Lithographed paper doll kits were the Barbies and Cabbage Patch Kids of the early 1800s, and brands quickly latched on, including paper dolls with their products in the hope whiny children would convince their parents to spend some cash.
But part of the beauty of the toy was its affordability – during the Great Depression, when newspapers only cost five cents, their paper doll pages provided hours of cheap fun. (This era has come to be known as the ‘Golden Age of Paper Dolls’.) The illustrated fashions represented aspirational fantasies: chic day ensembles, resortwear, ballgowns and wedding dresses. Nothing as vulgar as workwear – although, during wartime, paper dolls wore patriotic military and nurse’s uniforms. In decades heavy with women’s rights debate, a trend emerged for smart-yet-feminine officewear. Fluffy Ruffles, an office-worker doll whose struggles with idiot men were first published in a 1906 New York Herald cartoon, was so adored that she inspired a clothing line at Macy’s.
Paper doll characters with cutesy alliterative names – Lettie Lane, Polly Pratt, Dolly Dingle, Peggy Pryde – strutted through magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, mostly drawn by the Mcloughlin Brothers company, which licensed its designs to publications of all types. Dolls were also printed in fashion mags run by sewing pattern companies Butterick and Mccall’s. Betsy Mccall – a sweet-faced, all-american five-year-old with dark bobbed hair – made her debut in Mccall’s magazine in 1951, modelling outfits that could be made using Mccall’s patterns. In fact, Betsy was so popular that she burst into three dimensions as a series of collectible vinyl dolls.
Famous folks leapt from the page to be dressed in paper duds, too – early paper doll celebrities included ballerinas Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler; stage actresses Ellen Terry and Lillie Langtry, and all manner of Hollywood stars. (Elvis Presley was particularly popular among young girls excited to see him without his kit on.) An 1840 box set featuring Queen Victoria kicked off an obsession with paper royals, the full German Royal Family and House of Windsor among them.
It wasn’t all rosy, though: paper dolls also dressed their figures in racism. The first African-american doll, Topsey, was printed in 1863 – the same year as the US Emancipation Proclamation. But Topsey, a raggedy slave girl, appeared alongside Little Eva, a well-dressed white doll with shiny hair. The servile stereotypes kept on coming until 1950, when female illustrator Jackie Ormes created Torchy – a black lady adventurer who fought social injustice in a series of glamorous ‘Torchy Togs’.
Indeed, the same simplicity that made paper dolls so versatile also made them subversive. You didn’t have to dress them in the ‘right’ ways – you could even trace the figures to design your own outfits. So, while outwardly the dolls championed mainstream cultural values, they also offered a hidden queer message: kids, use fashion to create new identities!
In 1975, American illustrator Tom Tierney revived paper dolls as camp playthings for a generation raised on screens. Wondering what to give his mum for Christmas, he remembered she’d saved her childhood paper doll collection. He decided to make dolls of her favourite 1930s Hollywood stars: Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow and Clark Gable. Totally chuffed, Mrs Tierney showed the figures to a literary-agent friend, kickstarting Tom’s second career. His dolls were out and proud as early as 1979, when his book Attitude let readers dress New York queer icons in glamorous outfits. From drag queens and leather-clad bikers to eminent figures like Pope John Paul II, he created 400 paper doll tomes in total, each meticulously researched and historically accurate.
Today, paper dolls are still limited only by the imagination: they feature Rupaul’s Drag Race contestants and Black Lives Matter protesters, Marie Curie, Rihanna and Eleven from Stranger Things. Whether published as high-end art books, sold online or downloadable as free, printable PDFS, paper dolls never really go away – they just turn a new page.