Grodnertal Wooden Costume Dolls

Image Courtesy of Theriaults.com 

If you follow my Victorian Dolls, Victorian Traditions, The Victorian Era and Me Blog you know that I just LOVE the Victorian Era, love history, love to do research, and love fashion doll collections. Several years ago I ran across the Metropolitan Museum of Art website and fell in love with their collections, the ability to see everything they have in their collections, and the ability to set-up my own "My Met" space to bookmark items at the MET that I love.  So, I spent an afternoon "Moseying At The MET!" and wrote about it HERE.

Well, while researching the "Penny Wooden and Peg Wooden Dolls" I came across a series of beautiful Grodnertal Wooden Costume Dolls depicting the 11th - 16th century and just had to show them to you.  All of the dolls are from the Theriault's website.

I think they're all absolutely beautiful and love all their costumes.  As you would except they are all very pricey - especially the doll depicting the 16th century costume.

The French Doll Fashion Collection At The MET

If you follow my Victorian Dolls, Victorian Traditions, The Victorian Era and Me Blog you know that I just LOVE the Victorian Era, love history, and love to do research. In doing all of that I ran across the Metropolitan Museum of Art website the other day and fell in love with their collections, the ability to see everything they have in their collections, and the ability to set-up my own "My Met" space to bookmark items at the MET that I love.

Well, while "Moseying At The MET!" last week I came across items from their French Doll Fashion Collection and fell in love with them.  Now all you have to know as to why I would fall in LOVE with them is they have to do with dolls and have to do with the fashions of the Victorian Era and periods before and after that.

They are in fact a collection of fashion dolls displaying French fashions from 1715 until 1906.  There seems to be 42 dolls in the collection and they give you a wonderful picture of the way French fashion has changed through the ages.

Each of the doll pages has information of the fashion year the doll was created for, fashion designer who created it, date created, culture, medium, dimensions, credit line, and accession number. They also include a description containing information on the collection and information on the dolls design.

For example,  the 1715 doll shown in the picture above and at the top of this post had the following descriptive information on her design: The inspiration for this dress came from the painting L'Enseigne de Gersaint by Watteau. Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) was best known for inventing the fete galante, a genre characterized by outdoor parties and bucolic scenes in idyllic settings. L'Enseigne de Gersaint was actually completed in 1720, five years after the date of the Rochas design. Watteau created this work for his friend and art dealer, Gersaint's shop, where it is believed to have hung in the window as a sign. This painting, in addition to being an interesting study of everyday life in an art dealer's shop, is an excellent example of the famous "Watteau pleats". The fashionable women in Watteau's fete gallants were so often depicted wearing this style, that they became known as Watteau pleats.

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art the reason for the collection was as follows: - In 1947, in response to the suffering of post-World War II France, an American grassroots campaign organized a large-scale relief package. The following year France, moved by this generosity, organized a gift in kind. As the aide was sent to France housed in boxcars and dubbed the "American Friendship Train" the French created the "Gratitude" or "Merci Train", a set of 49 boxcars filled with gifts of thanks. Each of the 48 states was to receive a boxcar with the 49th shared between Washington D.C., and the Territory of Hawaii, which had contributed sugar on the Friendship Train. A wide array of items was included in these cars, from handmade children's toys to priceless works of art.

The Chambre Syndicale de la Couture de Parisienne, who, to raise money for the French people, had two years prior organized the Theatre de la Mode, a group of fashion dolls dressed in clothing from the 1947 couture collections, chose to create a new set of fashion dolls, this time representing the evolution of French fashion rather than the current season. Once again, the Syndicat tapped the most talented and well-known fashion designers, hairstylists, and accessory designers of the time to create these miniature masterpieces.

The unique design of the fashion doll, originally created for Theatre de la Mode and used again for the Gratitude Train was conceived by Eileen Bonabel, the plaster head by the artist Rebull. Each doll measures approximately 24 inches tall, with bodies made entirely of open wire. Human hair was used to fashion the hairstyles. Each designer chose a year between 1715 and 1906 for which to dress his doll. Their varying sources of inspiration included works of art, literature, and historic fashion plates. The Gratitude Train fashion dolls represent a unique moment in the history of couture as they represent not only creative interpretations of historic fashions by the greatest designers of the period, but also are infused with the unparalleled skill, care, and attention to detail that would have been applied in their full-size counterparts.

I would have to agree with the MET, but would add that viewing this collection in it's entirety would be visual eye-candy for anyone who loves the fashions of those periods.

The collection is not on display so, of course, I set-up a French Fashion Doll Collection Page and a set collection in My MET so I could view all the dolls in the collection at any time.  And, if I wanted to read more on any particular design all I would need to do is click on the image for that doll's page at the MET.  How great is that?  I LOVE it.

Both of my pages are shown below:

My Pinterest Page - French Fashion Doll Collection 

My MET - The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Set Items - Historical Fashion Dolls

I can't quite decide which is my favorite doll of the collection as of yet.  I have to read through all the descriptions first and then maybe I'll decide.   Or, I'll never decide and just enjoy each of the dolls for her beauty and the attention to detail on her amazing costume.

I hope you enjoy the collection as much as I do.

A Wonderful Moseying At The MET!

I spent last weekend fascinated by pictures of beautiful Victorian dresses on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website.  I had wanted to add some more Victorian dresses to my Victorian Dress Fashions page on Pinterest and figured that a museum website might be a good place to start.  So, I decided to go to the biggest museum in the U.S. the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

I would have loved to have physically visited the Met and seen these dresses, but they aren't on display right now and New York city is not a hop skip and a jump away.  So, I let my fingers do the walking or keying and spent several delightful hours just moseying through all their virtual displays.  I have to tell you that the amount of donated material is just astonishing.  I couldn't believe how many incredible Victorian dresses they have.  Hundreds upon hundreds.  All I could do was drool over them and think about what an astonishing display it would be to actually see them all in person.  Ah, one can dream.

The nice thing about the Met website is you can see all their collections whether they are currently on display or not.  Everything is cataloged and available online. You can even set up a "My Met" page where you can store and categorize your own MET favorites - which, of course, I did.  Of course, seeing beautiful creations is the optimum.  However, visiting the MET online is a close second.

While I was out there I quickly gathered that there were many, many dresses that might look Victorian, but actually aren't from that period which, of course, led me to a little research.  If you're a follower of my Linda's Blog you know how much I LOVE history and love researching.  My researching led me to several reference websites, several fashion websites, several museum websites, and so on.  I was in research heaven  which for me is like the next best thing to sliced bread.

What I learned was there are many, many periods to fashion and if you were to have a historic lineage display of the fashions throughout the years you'd be able to easily see how a Victorian dress might differ from an Edwardian or a Romantic period dress - even how the Victorian crinoline was different from the Victorian bustle dress.

It was a wonderful eye opener for me and benefited me in two ways.  One, I got to exercise my brain by learning something new and two, I got a lot of research material for my Victorian Dolls, Victorian Traditions, The Victorian Era and Me Blog.  My Victorian Dolls, Victorian Traditions, The Victorian Era and Me Blog is a personal, ad free blog all about the Victorian era, their history, their traditions, and my feeble attempt to create some Victorian dolls of my own.

With all this new knowledge I decided that I'd like to write a series on my Victorian Dolls, Victorian Traditions, The Victorian Era and Me Blog about the different fashion periods and show you some of the astonishing Victorian dresses that you can see on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website.  Not only do you get to see some of their Victorian dresses, but they provide you a little insight into the dress and a little history surrounding the fashion.  If you love Victorian dresses like I do you'll be in fashion heaven and be drooling over all the astonishing creations like I was.

I'll be sure to post on my Linda's Blog from time to time to let you know what's going on over on my Victorian Dolls, Victorian Traditions, The Victorian Era and Me Blog or you could bookmark it and check in from time to time yourself.

Historical Fashion Periods Timeline

Yesterday I posted an article entitled "A Wonderful Moseying At The MET!" concerning my preliminary research on the historical fashion periods and what I had learned.  Since I tend to like everything nice and neat and totally organized I decided the best way for me to try and understand the different fashion periods was to create a time line that I could update, change, and add to from time to time.

So, I created the following timeline that I've added to the sidebar of my Victorian Dolls, Victorian Traditions, The Victorian Era and Me Blog .  This timeline is really for me to help me understand what periods the fashions I like might fall into when I see different styles.  I am far from and will never claim to be any kind of an expert on historical fashion periods.  My timeline is being included in my sidebar as a personal reference tool for me. Something I can learn from, something I can update, something changeable if incorrect, and something I can update from time to time.

HISTORICAL FASHION PERIODS

• 0476 A.D. - 1150 Dark Ages
• 1150 - 1485 Medieval, Gothic, Middle Ages
• 1485 - 1550 Renaissance
• 1558 - 1603 Elizabethean/Jacobean
• 1620 - 1660 Cavalier (Early Baroque)
• 1660 - 1715 Baroque Restoration - The Golden Age - Louis XIV
• 1715 - 1775 Rococo
• 1769 - 1821 Napoleonic Wars
• 1775 - 1795 NeoClassical
• 1790 - 1795 Revolution
• 1795 - 1815 Directorie/Empire
• 1800 - 1803 Classical Greek Dress
• 1800 - 1820 Regency Fashion
• 1800 - 1837 Georgian Era
• 1804 - 1807 Etruscan and Egyptian Ornament
• 1815 - 1848 Romantic
• 1837 - 1860 Early Victorian - Charles Worth Era
• 1837 - 1901 Victorian Era
• 1848 - 1870 Victorian Crinoline
• 1860 - 1882 Victorian First Bustle Era
• 1870 - 1890 Victorian Bustle
• 1870 to 1914 Fun De Siecle, Art Nouveau Movement
• 1883 - 1901 Late Victorian - Second Bustle Era, Gibson Girls, Naughty Nineties
• 1890 - 1913 Edwardian
• 1895 - 1914 La Belle Epogue, Lost Golden Age
• 1914 - 1918 WWI
• 1920 - 1930 Art Deco and Roaring Twenties
• 1930 - 1940 Golden Age of Hollywood - Rise of Chanel, Stylish Thirties
• 1930 - 1950 Hollywood Glamour Girls
• 1939 - 1945 WWII
• 1940 - 1960 Dior Revolution. The New Look Era, Hourglass Silhouette
• 1945 - 2000 Ready To Wear Fashion or Pret-a-Porter
• 1950 - 1960 Rock N Roll Era
• 1960 - 1975 Hippies, Flower Power, Baby Boom Generation, Op Art
• 1975 - 1980 Mini skirts, Twiggy, Disco Fever
• 1980 - 1990 New Romantics, Power Dressing, Yuppies,
• 1985 - 2000 Grunge, Deconstructionism, Minimalism, Purism, Bo Ho Hippy