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Concept
Fashion doll
Summary
Fashion dolls are dolls primarily designed to be dressed to reflect fashion trends. They are manufactured both as toys for children to play with and as collectibles for adults. The dolls are usually modeled after teen girls or adult women, though child, male, and even some non-human variants exist. Contemporary fashion dolls are typically made of vinyl or another plastic.
Barbie was released by the American toy-company Mattel in 1959, and was followed by many similar vinyl fashion dolls intended as children's toys. The size of the Barbie, set the standard often used by other manufacturers. But fashion dolls have been made in many different sizes varying from .
Costumers and seamstresses use fashion dolls as a canvas for their work. Customizers repaint faces, reroot hair, or do other alterations to the dolls themselves. Many of these works are one-of-a-kind and are referred to as art dolls. These artists are usually not connected to the original manufacturers and sell their work to collectors.
Fashion dolls were commonly used throughout the courts in Europe in the 16th century to show the tactile qualities of fashion which could not be incorporated into paintings or described to tailors in words. A letter dated 1515 and sent by Federico Gonzaga on behalf of King Francis I of France to his mother Isabella d'Este asks her to send a fashion doll to the French court so that copies of her style might be made for the women of France. As an adult in Scotland, Mary, Queen of Scots owned dolls, called "pippens", which were dressed by her tailors. In April 1604 Helena Snakenborg, Marchioness of Northampton had a doll dressed in the latest fashion in London to send to her sister Karin Bonde in Sweden.
Such fashion dolls may have been in use as early as the 14th century, and were known from 1642 onward as 'Pandora'. In a treatise on collecting printed in 1565, Samuel Quiccheberg noted that princesses and queens sent each other dolls with details of foreign clothing.
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