Tag Archives: Paper dolls

What Could You Be This Halloween? Costumes Ideas from Cotsen

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In the count down to October 31, a post from 2016 might help the desperate eliminate the myriad possibilities for dressing up and settle on something unique but within the capabilities (and/or pocketbook) of the average person.  Perhaps some of the books featured here will get the juices flowing…

halloween-storage-com-pumpkin-paintingNow that the end-of-the-year holiday season in America has been pushed back from Thanksgiving to Halloween over the last ten years or so, the festivities associated with October 31st have changed dramatically, not the least of with their profitability–$8.4 billion this year.   One thing hasn’t changed: the pressure to design an unforgettable costume that no one else will have….

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The Halloween nightmare of mothers who aren’t crafty…

To put this seasonal anxiety in perspective, we invite you to look at some gay apparel children donned during the heyday of fancy-dress balls in Victorian England.  Fairy tale and storybook characters, queens and clowns (Pierrot was not a scary creep), all were all favorites for dress-up.  The publisher, Dean’s Rag Book Company, also marketed a brochure promoting different costumes based on illustrations in their books.  The customer paid for the instructions and received the “rag book material” gratis as the publisher’s thanks for the willingness to be a living advertisement at a public ball or carnival.  Unfortunately, the Cotsen textile collection does not own an example of the fancy dress costumes.

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Alice Hanslip, Fancy Dress A.B.C. Dean’s Rag Book, number 49. London: Dean’s Rag Book Company, 1905 (Cotsen 74181).

Another book in the collection, Children’s Fancy Dress Costumes, features a dozen plates of costumes, any of which makes the construction of the adorable mermaid suit look easy.  For each of the costumes, color choices, fabric suggestions, estimates for yardage and special materials are all provided.  It was also possible for families to purchase them ready-made. The text did suggest that the costumes were built to last for more than one party for more than one child.

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The choices include Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Dick Whittington, and a fairy godmother. Children’s Fancy Ball Costumes Illustrating Familiar Characters from Nursery Rhymes. London: Samuel Miller, ca. 1905 (Cotsen 1691).

Today’s trick or treaters wouldn’t recognize many of the characters in Children’s Fancy Ball Costumes, because so many new ones from contemporary children’s books, cartoons, and movies have taken their place. Some of them, such as strong women from Greek mythology and French history celebrated in the book of pantins, or jointed paper dolls, could be the inspiration for a new super heroine with or without the horse.  No need to explain who Penthesilea was, except in a head-to-head with a mom with a chair in the  Classics department.

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Job’s pantin of Penthesilea, the queen of the Amazons, killed at Troy by Achilles, is decently covered up, but still looks pretty fierce. Aristide Fabre, Amazones d’hier et d’aujourd’hui. Illustrated by Job (i.e. Jacques Maris Gaston Onfroy de Breville). London: Hachette, ca. 1905 (Cotsen 150584).

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The book’s front board features Joan of Arc and la Grande Mademoiselle.

How about something less ambitious, more modern, but retro?   This paper doll book manufactured as merchandise to be sold during super-model Twiggy’s American tour in 1968 made it easy for her little fans to strut her style.

 

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With a pair of fishnet stockings, you’re ready to go.

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This is the actual dress bound into the paper doll book. It is one of the more restrained ensembles in the book. Don’t pretend there wasn’t a fake fur mini coat in neon colors hanging in the closet for years…

If the man in your life asks for help coming up with something to wear to the office Halloween party, take a hint from the newest addition to Cotsen’s paper doll collection.  Inspiration is as close as the closet…  Add that chicken suit lying around from a previous Halloween, he can say he’s Albert Einstein  going to a party at the Institute.

Gift of Molly Bidwell and Susan Klaiber . Cotsen in process.

Take heart, set up the sewing machine, grab your glue gun (or credit card) and remember that even Martha Stewart doesn’t hit the bull’s eye every year..

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The Queen of Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things.

Now I realize how shocking low the bar was set during the 1960s in Manhattan Beach, California, where I grew up.  A day or two before Halloween we hacked crude faces in pumpkins with kitchen knives instead of a selection of cunning little saws.  By first grade, I had graduated from trick-or-treating under the supervision of a sane adult to running around with a pack of neighborhood kids after dark.   Most of us wore homemade costumes and carried swag bags recycled from the grocery store. When we had reached the legal limit of candy or our curfew, which ever came first, we would head over to the house of Skipper Frank, a local kiddie television show host, to admire the audio-animatronic horror sitting on his porch, being careful not to  set off his bad-tempered Afghan hounds.  Never mind, we had fun anyway…

Black Paper Dolls in Mattel’s Happy Family Brand

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The toy manufacturer Mattel joined forces in the mid-1960s with the publisher Whitman to bolster the popular Barbie and Skipper brands with sets of paper dolls, a speciality of Whitman’s since the 1930s.  Some authorities think the sheer number and variety of Mattel/Whitman paper dolls produced from the 1970s onward probably dealt the genre its death’s blow by turn of the new century.  Supposedly little girls no longer play with paper dolls: it’s up to the collectors who find them fascinating to hunt down and preserve them.

While researching the recent post on Skipper, I discovered in the stacks a set of these Mattel/Whitman paper dolls, The Happy Family.   I was surprised to see represented multi-generational Black family dressed in conservative, but mod-ish fashions of the mid-seventies instead of figures that more closely corresponded with my idea of Mattel dolls.  What exactly does Cotsen have?

The minimal publishing information on the covers was enough to trace the paper dolls back to the original product line of fashion dolls.  The Whitman logo appears in the upper right-hand corner and the actual imprint, nearly illegible against the border of coarsely woven fabric, states that this is a Whitman book and that Whitman is a subsidiary of Western, better known as the publisher of Little Golden Books.  But the pamphlet is not Whitman’s intellectual property.  Barely readable In the lower right hand corner below the cross-stitching, is a statement by the copyright holder Mattel that “The Happy Family” ®, “Hal,” “Hattie,” and “Hon” are U.S. registered trademarks used here by permission of Mattel.  One of the pages of costumes has a second, much clearer copyright statement without the information about the trademarks.

Three Black fashion dolls preceded “The Happy Family” paper dolls: “Colored Francie” in 1967, which was quickly withdrawn, Christie, Barbie’s best friend, in 1968, and in 1969, Julia, modeled on performer Diahann Carroll. .  The members, dad Hal, mom Hattie, Baby Hon, and the Happy grandparents (purchased separately from the other three), were introduced in 1974 as the friends of the Sunshine Family, Steve, Steffie, Baby Sweets, and the Sunshine grandparents.  The black and the white dolls were made with the same molds for the bodies and heads. The Happy and Sunshine families had a peripheral connection at best with the 1970s Barbie universe.

If not exactly hippies or flower children, the Sunshine Family was more counterculture than the pack Barbie ran with during the Age of Aquarius.  The Sunshines ran a hobby store for a living, maintained a very well furnished art studio in the back of their truck, rode a bicycle built for three, and probably shopped in bulk at the whole foods co-op.  Wholesome and just a little folksy, the Sunshines probably would have been comfortable spending time with the other Mattel dolls who went back to nature in the 1970s..

Promotional photographs for the two toy families suggested that the Happys hung out at the Sunshines’ house (it doesn’t look as if the Happys’ accessories included their own fold-up cardboard digs).  Like the pioneering Christie and Julia Black dolls,the Happys were designed to play supporting roles to the Sunshines.  Even though the black dolls were not equal to the white ones, the fact that they were shown in a domestic space with no apparent barriers between them perhaps reflected the naive hope that if only Black and white people would spent time together, they’d discover how much they had in common and come to like each other.

Both lines were cancelled by Mattel in 1978, but reintroduced in redesigned versions in the 1980s and the early 2000s.  I wasn’t able to figure out if the new Happys were characters in their own right or if they were still supposed to be played with in the shadow of the Sunshines.