Living Dolls: Doll Dressing at The Museum at FIT

5 October 2026, by Jane Francis

In this week's blog post, Costume Society member Jane Francis reviews Doll Dressing, on view at The Museum at FIT, New York, until January 3rd 2027.

Dolls occupy a peculiar position within fashion. They are intimate objects of childhood play, miniature bodies onto which ideas of beauty, identity, aspiration, fantasy, and social convention are projected. They have also long operated as vehicles for fashion itself. For its Fall 2026 exhibition Doll Dressing, The Museum at FIT examines the enduring and often unexpected relationship between dolls and fashion, posing a compelling and previously overlooked question: How have dolls influenced fashion?

Curated by Dr Colleen Hill, Senior Curator of Costume at The Museum at FIT, the exhibition brings together more than 170 objects, including fashion dolls, garments, accessories, artworks, and moving image. Designers range from Balenciaga and Comme des Garçons to Martin Margiela, Marc Jacobs, Patrick Kelly, Anna Sui, Jeremy Scott for Moschino, Loewe, Louis Vuitton, and Undercover. The breadth of material immediately establishes the doll not as a peripheral or frivolous influence, but as a persistent presence within fashion’s visual and material vocabulary.

The exhibition reconsiders the history of the fashion doll itself, tracing how these dressed figures circulated as miniature transmitters of style long before the modern era. Decades before the rise of Barbie, dolls helped disseminate fashionable silhouettes, fabrics, and construction details across geographical borders. An eighteenth-century example on loan from Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia anchors this history, demonstrating the doll's practical function as a three-dimensional fashion model. While the exhibition’s primary framework is Western, its layout intentionally introduces a more global and inclusive lens.

By the twentieth century, this relationship had become more complex. Dolls were no longer simply reproducing adult fashions in miniature; increasingly, their own proportions, styling, gestures, and fantasy worlds began feeding back into the way people dressed.

Questions of representation appear early in the exhibition. The introductory gallery establishes the core thesis of the show through a cabinet of key examples, including a 1970s Daisy doll dressed by Mary Quant and an original Black Barbie from 1980, designed by Kitty Black Perkins. These situate dolls within broader histories of representation and style.

Adjacent works explore the physical transformation of the human body into something doll-like. An illuminated image screen presents Pat McGrath’s highly praised “glass skin” makeup for John Galliano’s final Maison Margiela Artisanal collection in 2024. Referencing antique Victorian dolls, McGrath transformed models into porcelain-like figures through ultra-glossy skin, pencil-thin eyebrows, and vividly painted makeup. Importantly, the technique was developed across all skin tones, challenging the historically exclusionary association of “porcelain” beauty with whiteness.

A Conner Ives 2025 Protect the Dolls T-shirt, created to benefit the Trans Lifeline charity, extends this conversation into contemporary questions of identity, femininity, and visibility.

Thinking Outside the Box

I spoke with curator Dr Colleen Hill about the intention and curatorial process behind the exhibition.

As early as the late fourteenth century, members of European courts exchanged intricately dressed dolls as a means of communicating fashion in three dimensions. Hill explained that these dolls may “look like toys, but they weren’t. They were meant for grown women to exchange fashion ideas.”

Hill defines the phenomenon of “doll dressing” as encompassing clothing, accessories, hair, makeup, and even gestures that draw inspiration from dolls. The exhibition ultimately reveals that doll dressing can be both expressive and subversive, offering a means of exploring identity, fantasy, and personal style.

Hill explained that one of the aspects of the exhibition she was most proud of was the opportunity to “think outside the box, about the relationship between dolls and fashion”. She pointed particularly to the section “All Dolled Up, where flappers, 1960s “dolly birds,” and Japanese Lolita fashion provide a tangible way to challenge stereotypes surrounding femininity and doll-like dressing. Rather than presenting the “living doll” as merely vapid or passive, the exhibition considers the agency involved in deliberately adopting and performing doll-like aesthetics”

Among the works Hill highlighted is a loan from the Museum of the City of New York comprising an adult-sized ensemble and a matching miniature doll created by Ruby Bailey, who ran a dressmaking business in Harlem. Hill explained- “During the 1960s Bailey began modifying Barbie dolls, altering their skin tone and adding natural hair as an expression of Afrocentric pride. She later developed her own distinctive soft-sculpture dolls, dressing them in miniature versions of her designs” The pairing is both visually striking and historically significant, bringing together fashion, self-representation, craftsmanship, and cultural identity.

One omission Hill would have liked to include was “Viktor & Rolf’s series of small-scale porcelain dolls paired with life-sized works”. Standing around two feet high, the dolls are handmade replicas inspired by nineteenth-century French and German antique dolls and dressed in exact miniature versions of the Dutch duo’s most recognizable haute couture designs. The works were unavailable as they are currently part of a travelling exhibition. Viktor & Rolf’s recent Cinderella Barbie, however, is included, and the designers also contributed to the accompanying Doll Dressing publication.

Through the Looking Glass

The exhibition builds on previous MFIT curatorial strategies by integrating objects and garments rather than isolating dress from its wider cultural context. This creates a productive dialogue around hierarchy and reinforces the importance of interdisciplinary thinking within dress history: garments do not exist in isolation, but within broader visual, material, and cultural ecosystems.

There is something deeply nostalgic about the tiny clothes, perfect miniature worlds, and seemingly endless possibilities contained within dolls. The exhibition cleverly avoids relying solely on sentimentality. The doll instead becomes a lens through which to consider scale, gender, childhood, nostalgia, identity, representation, fantasy, and even unease.

One of the most engaging sections, Modes in Miniature, looks directly at designers’ fascination with working at reduced scale. Full-size garments are shown alongside miniature counterparts by designers including Anna Sui, Jason Wu, and Emily Adams Bode Aujla. The dialogue between the two scales highlights how, for many designers, the doll serves as an early site of creative experimentation—a first opportunity to explore the relationship between fabric, proportion, and the body.

This becomes particularly compelling in Martin Margiela’s Fall 1994 collection, in which doll clothes and accessories were enlarged to approximately 5.2 times their original size. Seams, stitches, proportions, and construction details that appear ordinary on a toy become deliberately awkward when translated onto the human body. What initially seems playful destabilizes the logic of conventional garment construction. By magnifying the imperfections of doll clothing, Margiela draws attention to fashion’s own systems of proportion and the idealized body around which garments are traditionally conceived, creating an almost Alice in Wonderland-like shift between the child’s world and that of the adult.

The Dollhouse extends miniature thinking beyond dress and into domestic space. Lirika Matoshi’s 2024 Apartment Coatis particularly effective: rooms, furniture, rugs, flowers, and a bed are appliquéd across the garment, transforming the wearer into both body and architecture. The piece captures the imaginative permeability between doll, clothing, house, and inhabitation. Dressing becomes inseparable from constructing a world.

Analogue Revival

Playing with Dolls addresses childhood, nostalgia, and scale. Designers including Margiela and Jeremy Scott challenge conventional ideas of proportion and construction through exaggerated sizing and trompe l’oeil effects.

Jeremy Scott’s Spring 2017 Moschino collection offers a witty reversal of scale and illusion. Constructed to lie completely flat against the body, a vivid red jacket and skirt employ trompe l’oeil drapery and exaggerated tabs to resemble paper-doll clothing. The body appears almost flattened into a two-dimensional cut-out fashion image. The reference is playful and instantly legible. It also speaks to our increasingly screen-based consumption of fashion, where garments are so often first encountered as flat digital images rather than physical objects.

This tension between digital and analogue physicality recurs across other examples of contemporary fashion. Jun Takahashi for Undercover playfully attaches Velcro-backed accessories and flat garments onto clothing, while Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons two-dimensional wool and felt collection of 2012 questioned fashion’s relationship with image, representation, and criticism. The exhibition also includes a pink nylon dress from Kawakubo’s 2007 Curiosity collection with a minute ruffled frock attached to its front. Elsewhere, a dress created by Mr Pearl for Suzanne Bartsch in the 1980s is literally constructed from cloth doll faces.

The exhibition is particularly strong when it complicates the assumption that doll aesthetics are inherently passive or infantilizing. All Dolled Up examines the flapper, the 1960s “dolly bird,” and Japanese Lolita fashion. Here the doll-like body becomes something consciously performed. A replica of the Twiggy mannequin—the first celebrity mannequin—is shown alongside a dress from Twiggy’s own Twiggy London Girl label. Doll-like femininity becomes less an imposed identity than a style capable of being appropriated, exaggerated, and redirected.

Broken Dolls

Playfulness is only one aspect of the exhibition. In Broken Dolls, the atmosphere shifts decisively towards the unsettling. The section considers horror, the “kinderwhore” aesthetic of the 1990s, Courtney Love, Comme des Garçons, Olivier Theyskens, Monster High dolls, and the work of German artist Hans Bellmer, whose practice explored the darker and more disturbing possibilities of the doll.

These works challenge conventional ideas of desirability, beauty, innocence, and femininity. Frills, babydoll dresses, exaggerated femininity, and damaged innocence are no longer reassuring. Instead, they expose the instability of the doll as a symbol. It can signify beauty and conformity, but equally resistance, distortion, subversion, and menace.

Living Dolls

The museum itself provides an important context for the exhibition. As the only institution in New York City devoted exclusively to fashion, MFIT houses more than 50,000 garments and accessories spanning the eighteenth century to the present, collecting, conserving, documenting, exhibiting, and interpreting fashion as a vital and continuously evolving field of study.

What makes Doll Dressing successful is its refusal to reduce the subject to nostalgia. Barbie is inevitably present, but she does not dominate. Instead, the doll emerges as a much broader cultural mechanism: a miniature body upon which fashion rehearses ideas before projecting them back onto us.

The scenography and exhibition design are comparatively minimal. Objects are positioned largely at eye level, making the exhibition easy to navigate and allowing close consideration of both garments and dolls. I felt the design could have embraced more of the playfulness and wit inherent in the subject. Interactive paper-doll or cut-out elements might have encouraged visitors to participate more directly in the exhibition’s central idea of dressing and transformation.

A broader representation of emerging voices would have further enriched the exhibition. As graduate designers frequently explore nostalgia, play, and miniaturization as recurring themes, including these newer perspectives could have successfully extended the historical dialogue into contemporary practice.

Beneath the playfulness, however, sits a serious proposition. Dolls teach us how bodies might be dressed, posed, idealized, disciplined, represented, or transformed. Fashion does much the same. By bringing these two systems together, Doll Dressing reveals just how frequently the boundary between playing with clothes and constructing identity begins to disappear.

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Doll Dressing: Fashion from Barbie to Bratz and Beyond (Rizzoli, October 2026). Alongside seven richly illustrated chapters by Dr Colleen Hill, the book includes contributions by scholars including Dr Elizabeth Way, MFIT Curator of Costume and Accessories, and Dr Valerie Steele, MFIT Director and Chief Curator, as well as interviews with designers Martin Margiela, Viktor & Rolf, and Jun Takahashi, offering further insight into the role of the doll within their work.

Jane recently visited The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also in New York, which you can catch up with on our blog.

Jane Francis MA, SFHEA- is a global fashion academic and researcher. For over 30 years Jane has worked in Fashion as a practitioner, archivist, and creative consultant and as an educator and leader at academic institutions in London: Central Saint Martins, London College of Fashion and New York at Parsons School of Design.