Doll Development in the 1960s-1970s
by The 1960s were dominated by manufacturers’ desperate attempts to decrypt or improve on the seemingly undefeatable Barbie formula, including the British Sindy, who was the most successful of these rival dolls.
Small trolls were made to fit on the end of a pencil and often invoked school teachers’ wrath in this era, when play was still seen as suspect in the primary school curriculum. It was popular to keep collections of different-size trolls as a family-although the dolls were genderless, as they had no genitals and generally wore no clothes. Their faces were masculine and wizened, but friendly and good-hearted. Troll hair featured bright colors, and although the first dolls were made of flesh-colored plastic, the later, cheaper trolls came in many bizarre combinations of hair and body colors. Thus they could be seen as an aspect of the questioning of gender and other conventionalities of the later 1960s. The original dolls came from Scandinavia but most were copied in Hong Kong and other cheaper markets. Like the other bizarre-shaped novelty dolls, trolls brought visual signifiers of the unstable, psychedelic, spaced-out world of late 1960s San Francisco into the culture childhood. Cereal box toys, exported in the millions from Australia to United States breakfast food manufacturers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, although often regarded as “boys’ toys,” were also cherished by girls and shared with trolls the androgynous, indefinable body and mind-blowing range of unnatural colors in representing a small figure.
The most beautiful and conventional dolls of this period were the stylish Ideal dolls of the Chrissy family, including Velvet and Tiffany Taylor. The sculpting made their faces and bodies seem assured and appealing, with a strong evocation of an individualist persona. The dolls’ dressing was an elegant reflection of early 1970s fashion: miniskirts in chocolate-colored velvet and coarse orange lace, which make the dolls perfect documents of the design values of the period. On the other hand, the early 1970s was a down period for Mattel as Ideal came to the forefront (until Superstar Barbie restored the former hierarchy). This oeuvre of beautiful, quality Ideal dolls marks the end of a fairly straight and formal vision of doll making that had dominated since the renaissance. One can easily track the pedigree of this solid and predictable definition of the doll trade back to early nineteenth-century Germany, and certainly earlier, with-sadly-far less material evidence. After the 1970s, doll production ceased to be a solid central point of reference in marketing products to and for girls, becoming increasingly diffused amid a white noise of both competing-and therefore diverse-and similar-and thus indistinguishable-products. Also, the increasing decline in both price and production values in some ways debased the doll, although dolls were now being seen more widely and in greater numbers than previously in their history. More little girls had more dolls than ever before.
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