Tattooed fairies and seductive ankles

The exhibition catalogue Guys and Dolls Art, Science, Fashion and Relationships 2005 Brighton Museum and Art Gallery [UK] suggested that dolls should be considered as an adjunct medium to fashion along with betterrecognised examples of film and popular music. Dolls with fashionable personae provide both a documentary mirror of fashion and a forum for the development of popular commentaries and discourse around fashion. Dolls offer information that can be read in direct terms of dress studies as empirical investigations of surviving items and in terms of the many conceptual and discursive visions of the body that are now prevalent in cultural discussions of fashion. This paper will look at some of the messages that can be read about fashion and popular cultural perceptions of beauty through dolls' bodies. The paper will present a general visual survey on the impact of fashionable style of the material design of the doll's body format over the past 200 years. Fashion in clothing and beauty image down the generations dictates the industrial design decisions aimed at developing doll products, thus the doll provides insight into the presence of fashion in design history beyond the history of garments, as well as the influence of fashion per se on representing the body. Attention will be paid to the last forty years and Mattel's output in particular, as well as some of the strange and unheimlich vision of the body offered by dolls and contemporary culture.