The Paper Doll Club
Decoder Ring
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 27 August 2018
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Paper dolls were a ubiquitous part of children’s lives for decades, and then mostly disappeared. David Wolfe was a boy growing up in the 1950’s, with paper dolls as his primary means of accessing a world of glamour and beauty that he didn’t see at home in Ohio. He’d go on to a career in fashion, guided by his paper dolls, just as paper dolls were falling out of fashion themselves, replaced by Barbies and other plastic dolls. This episode is about paper dolls, and their surprising connections to fashion, nostalgia, queerness, and David’s extraordinary career. Producer Benjamin Frisch co-hosts the show to explore the story.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | My name is David Wolfe. |
| 0:08.7 | I grew up in Ohio in the 1950s, in the Eisenhower era. |
| 0:14.3 | I remember thinking that when I saw The Wizard of Oz movie, |
| 0:18.6 | that that had been filmed in my own backyard, |
| 0:21.1 | with the scarecrow and the corn and the flowers and things. And then as the developers came, |
| 0:28.2 | evil men, they turned the whole thing into a black and white sepia-colored movie, just like |
| 0:35.7 | in the Wizard of Oz before the tornado. And we had plenty of |
| 0:39.2 | tornadoes in Ohio, so I often got confused about reality and movies. I'm still often confused. |
| 0:47.6 | I had a cousin Lois, who was eight years older than I, and she had a superlative collection of paper dolls. And whenever I would go visit her, |
| 0:57.4 | which I did as often as possible, I would beg to play with the paper dolls. And it was great, |
| 1:04.4 | great fun to dress them up and prop them up against the furniture and stuff and pretend they were |
| 1:09.7 | going shopping or to the movies, |
| 1:12.4 | you know. I was a terribly odd little boy. Could you have had like an actual doll? |
| 1:19.6 | I don't think I could have. I wouldn't have dared to ask for one. The only cissies had dolls. |
| 1:27.3 | Bad enough, I had paper dolls. |
| 1:29.3 | Paper dolls could be a secret in my chest of drawers in my bedroom, underneath my socks. |
| 1:55.3 | Music This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries. |
| 1:58.0 | I'm Slate's TV critic Willa Paskin. |
| 2:02.6 | Every month, we take a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open, and try to figure out what it means and why it matters. Paper dolls, the cut-out figures that |
| 2:08.6 | came with cut-out clothing to dress them in, were a vital part of children's lives and fashion |
| 2:13.6 | culture for generations. They were meant to be instructive, to teach young women and |
| 2:18.7 | girls how to look and behave. But paper dolls have been used in all sorts of ways by all |
... |
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