By Ben Marks — One of the most cherished myths about children is that they possess incredible imaginations. Put a child on the floor in front of a pile of blocks, this magical thinking goes, and she will assemble veritable Roman Aqueducts and Towers of Babel, making the efforts of most adults look, well, like child’s play. "We had Eames furniture, of course. Who didn’t?" In fact, psychologists have long known that the imaginations of children are actually kind of lame. That's because most little kids...

From Little Fanny to Fluffy Ruffles: The Scrappy History of Paper Dolls

By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — In the cookie-cutter conservative era of the 1950s, even good, wholesome girls were undressing Elvis, and not just in their minds. Young women across America indulged their fashion-fueled fantasies with little paper playmates of the rock-'n'-roll king, the latest subject from a thriving paper-doll industry that knew its audience well. “Young women identified with her independence, even if they could not yet claim it for themselves.” During the mid-20th century, the popularity of paper...

Antique Dolls, from Wood and Wax to Kewpie

By Maribeth Keane and Jessica Lewis — We have a very small team here at the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood, so we all have to do lots of different things. I don’t look after all the dolls, but I oversee the collections. I do the waxes and the woodens. I’ve got colleagues who are in charge of the cloth ones and the plastic ones and the porcelain ones and so on. I used to do all of it. When Caroline Goodfellow took early retirement about 10 or 11, years ago, I had to take on the whole doll collection as well as all my...