My Sister and I spent many happy hours
playing with our Paper Dolls and
imagined we were glamours ladies
with all our wonderful outfits.
An interesting fact about early printed doll
clothes was that they did not include tabs
for dressing the dolls, as are common with
paper dolls today.
Instead, children painstakingly attached
the clothes with tiny drops of sealing wax.
They took care to press gently when they
attached their clothes to their dolls,
lest they tear the paper doll.
Paper dolls first appeared in Paris
in the 18th century,
during the reign of Louis XV.
The whimsical toys easily found
a place in the delightful atmosphere
of royal French society.
On the other side of the English Channel
during this time period,
proper British printers mixed fun
and virtue by printing moral stories
on the flat sheets that comprised the dolls!
Hence, from their earliest, paper dolls
were used in a very different ways,
and were accurate reflections of
very different cultures.
Ruth Handler watched her daughter
Barbara play with paper dolls,
and noticed that she often enjoyed
giving them adult roles.
At the time, most children's toy dolls
were representations of infants.
Realizing that there could be
a gap in the market, Handler suggested
the idea of an adult-bodied
doll to her husband Elliot,
a co-founder of the Mattel toy company
and the rest as they say is history.
