It’s clear that your childhood is a big influence on your doll designs, where else do you get your inspiration from?
Everywhere! Art, culture, nature, fashion, music… whatever. When I’m looking for reference pieces for my designs, I turn to books, magazines and the internet mostly. Also, a lot of my designs are inspired by anime and cosplay. These largely Japanese art and clothing styles are hyper graphic and colorful, meaning they translate really well to doll design.
When looking for inspiration, do you prefer to look to vintage or contemporary fashion?
Definitely vintage. I love vintage fashion, especially from the first half of the 20th century. I think all the clothes from that era were simpler and higher quality, with a commitment to function as well as form. I especially love vintage dolls.
[Cary shows me a doll from her own collection] This one is made of something called bisque, this is what they made dolls out of sometimes before vinyl, bisque is a kind of unglazed porcelain, so it has this very matte finish which gives it a pretty realistic skin-like texture. Obviously we have to be very careful with this…. that’s why we keep it on the shelf closest to the floor [laughs].
This doll is called a Bleuette doll, we’ve made some with this mold. I love the all bisque antique doll, antique mignonette Doll, because the face, the shoes, and the socks are all hand painted. Also, they have these little sleepy eyes that are so sweet. I love it. One of my favorite antique bisque doll brands is Kestner doll who are based in Germany.
We have a in-house library of vintage dolls and vintage doll magazines that I frequently look to for inspiration. I like to work these vintage styles into our current RRFF dolls, for example Bella Hummingbird has this sweet ruffled pink and white dress that is very much inspired by vintage fashions.