Doll face

I don’t feel the need to add to the shower of congratulations raining down on the Viktor & Rolf exhibition at the Barbican in London. Other than to say the mannequins made me very happy.

And they got me thinking. I’ve always liked dolls faces. Whether a peg doll, a wax mannequin from the 1920s, plastic doll faces from haberdashery shops, a nested Russian doll or a Sasha doll – the educationally acceptable face of dolls, dressed in what could have been early Margaret Howell. I used to have a beloved set of Sashas.

The face pictured here is from a jointed wooden peg doll. These dolls were cheap and plentiful in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, sold by street peddlers and often called Dutch dolls due to their more illustrious predecessors, the fashion dolls of the 17th and 18th centuries. These dolls became stars of their own (now politically questionable) book by Florence Upton: "Adventures Of Two Dutch Dolls " in 1895. Versions of the dolls in the book are still being made and photographer Tim Walker used the books as inspiration for a Vogue shoot recently.

But my doll came from Pollock’s Toy Theatre in the 1960s. Apparently part of a large case of the dolls the Pollocks' had discovered in a case in a barn in the Dolomites. The dolls were still packed in brown paper parcels for dispatch to pre-war toy shops and the Pollocks’ had bought them all to bring back to their shop / museum.

The Vicktor & Rolf mannequins have dolls faces. The intertwined history of dolls faces and mannequins’ faces, of fashion and image and the parallel story of cosmetics and how we paint ourselves, means that that made perfect sense to me.

The gloves are off

Cecil Beaton’s notion of Englishness has always held great appeal for me. It is most definitely the blowsy other-end of my taste spectrum from Ravilious and Bawden. Too many soft focus filters and roses really. But the story telling, the visual props and references, the colours, the drawings. It’s all so very fashion.

A man who carries a debt to Beaton - Tim Walker – has an exhibition at the Design Museum at the moment. Eagerly awaited by me, as I have plenty of torn-out spreads by Walker in my scrapbooks. His shoots, and the Shona Heath props and sets that often accompany them, have a beautiful other-worldliness to them. Nothing gritty or heroin-chic here.

But what holds my attention in a magazine doesn’t necessarily, it seems, hold it in a museum. Context, in this case, is most definitely everything. The quality of the images in the Walker exhibition just don’t stand up to close examination or large reproduction. It is as if the dreamy, drowsy story-book intimacy of his magazine shoots has had the door flung open and an unkind, over-strong sunlight has been let in on them.

It’s difficult for me to criticise this one, being a fan. The space Walker is showing in at the museum is a difficult white space and they have tried to give Walker a traditional hang for his work, which weakens the impact, I think. I know it is all part of being taken seriously in one’s career, your first big show in a major museum. But I didn’t feel any closer to Walker’s work after having seen this show, just disappointed.

The best bits of the exhibition were where the convention cracked and they showed some of the wonderful props from his shoots (see here a detail of a human-sized glove), his notebooks and a film of a Vogue shoot. But for the rest; it lacks a sense of discovery, wit and beauty of the unexpected. And those qualities are, for me, what Walker’s work is all about.