When, back in spring 2012, Integrity Toys announced their line up for the year, one of the most talked about dolls was She's Not There Poppy Parker. The dominant theme of the Poppy collection was swinging 60's and London back in the days of Mary Quant and Vidal Sassoon but this one stood out as she channelled uncannily the model that defined the image of an era: Twiggy. Her short, boyishly cropped hair, her mod outfit and accessories, her bold make up, all reminded us of her. Anticipation ran high, until collectors started receiving the doll. Many complaints were written on boards and blogs about how different she was from the prototype, how washed out she looked and many people felt disappointed. I was one of the people who got the doll so let's see how she measures up to expectations.
First impressions: she is a very beautiful doll. Even inside the box she looks lovely and cute and does remind me of Twiggy a lot. People complaining she looks nothing like the promotional photos should remember that photos can be retouched/overexposed etc. to make them look a certain way. Even Twiggy did not look like her photos did. The trick would be to see how she looked in photos taken of her and how close she would come to the prototype (which for me was not that different to begin with).
A major problem was immediately apparent: the hood of her coat could not be fastened under her chin. Not only was the strap a bit smaller than it should have been, the hood itself could have been cut a tiny bit bigger. And the design of the hood is completely different than the one shown in the promo photos. This was indeed disappointing.
On a previous post I had written about the inspiration for this outfit and how it came from an identical (minus hood and boots) one that Diana Rigg as Emma Peel was wearing in the Avengers series. The same dress and coat were also photographed for British Vogue on Jean Shrimpton (who is another Poppy Parker look alike) and was designed by Jean Varon for the Avengers Collection. I love the outfit. If you can forget the hood mishap, it is pure mod sixties in it's best. It consists of the white coat over the black dress with contrasting stripes, red fishnet stockings (which stain terribly, remove them immediately from your doll), boots, handbag, ball striped earrings (Twiggy was wearing many pairs in this style in editorials) and red Jackie O sunglasses like the white ones that Sweet Confection Poppy is wearing.
The bag is one of the prettiest I have seen on this line so far. And she comes with a second set of white painted glove hands to maximize the mod effect. The boots are nice but I would have preferred them without the open toe. The original outfit had shoes that looked more like a negative version of the ones Bus Stop Darla is wearing.
Her make up is, to my eyes. just like the promos - neither washed out nor pronounced. I forgot to set her eyelashes properly for most of the photo-shoot but she still looks great. Her hair is nicely cropped and I have seen many people who washed and re-set them with even better results but I still have not tried this.
When I got Bus Stop Darla, I had to re-dress Poppy with that outfit: it is one that the real Twiggy was wearing in many photos and is very iconic. The results are breathtaking.
She looks even better with this outfit than with the mod one (which looks great on Darla, but that's another photo shoot). It inspired me to have a series of photos tampered with to make them look vintage, like they were lifted off magazines of the 60's. I hope you like them.
The set was made by using Karim Rashid's chess - the colours and design matched mod-Poppy very well!
