When I was younger my Mum gave me a stack of 'dressing dolls' roughly thrown into a paper bag. They hadn't been touched or played with for over a decade so I had great fun discovering them and working out which outfits went with which dollies. The principle is: you have a cut-out cardboard or paper doll, often complete with shaky paper stand, decked out in modest underwear and classically feminine. Each doll comes with a 'book' of outfits and accessories - paper outlines that you have to cut out and secure to the doll using paper 'tabs' that wrap around the cardboard figure.
As I grew older and my motor skills improved, I found great enjoyment from drawing my own scale outfits, complete with tabs, and using those to supplement the characters' wardrobes. The liberty of being able to create my own designs was akin to the freedoms of being a fashion designer, minus sewing and expensive materials, and I feel that I gained and learnt a lot from the creative yet precise nature of such games.
Left: Traditional dressing doll, Right: a variation on the dressing doll - stickers rather than paper cut-outs
Dressing dolls, although still available and greatly modernised (think Disney, a lot of pink and unrealistically skinny and long-legged figures) have long been usurped by the more convenient and versatile dolls such as Barbie. Try making an outfit for a Barbie doll? For an eight-year-old... impossible.
My verdict: give me a dressing doll any day!
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