Friday, Aug 29, 2008
This isn't your mother's Barbie: Welcome to a Web subculture where pixelated gothic Lolitas, preps and weirdos are good wholesome fun.
Oct 7, 2003 | Petite but curvy, Lolita is a knockout in a matching black leather corset and knee-length skirt. Her wide, oval face and saucer-sized eyes are accentuated by rings of light brown hair infused with delicate blond highlights. This mass of curls is held back with frilly, girlish red ribbons that reveal a choker and an attached chain that drops between her small breasts. Under the skeletal remains of a Victorian hoop skirt, fishnet stockings end in mammoth Japanese-style platform boots. Lolita is nothing if not a study in contrasts.
But there is more to Lolita than a hyper-stylized, postmodern fashion sense, as the bloody stump of her right arm and her broken wings attest. Lolita is a fallen teen angel -- the very picture of innocence lost. With her smudged cupid's mouth and wide eyes bleeding tears, Lolita is both haunting and, somehow, impossibly cute. This, perhaps, can be attributed to the fact that even on her mighty platform boots, Lolita is 2.5 inches tall and occupies only two dimensions.
Scarred, brokenhearted and gothic, Lolita wants only one thing. "She's sad that her wings are broken and she wishes she had new ones to fly back to heaven," says Jenny, Lolita's 17-year-old creator. Lolita is a doll, but not in the traditional sense. She is, according to Chris, a 15-year-old California sophomore, a "badass Bo Peep." Lolita wants to go home -- to that great dollhouse in the sky.
Lolita is an example of a new type of doll found in the almost entirely female Web-based community of "dolling." Dolling is a hobby in which tiny characters are, at their most time-consuming, created pixel-by-pixel in graphics programs such as Photoshop, MS Paint, and Paint Shop Pro. These dolls are roughly from a half-inch to 4 inches tall -- about the size of a Nintendo character.
Dolling is not all blood and leather. In this Lilliputian world, postage stamp-sized, self-created fairies, manga characters, punks, hobbits, and gothic Lolitas peacefully coexist in the same infinite dollhouse -- a dollhouse with no physical location, but millions of windows in the form of computer monitors. The Web has become the setting for a new kind of play and dolls have shed a dimension, becoming flat like their paper ancestors. As a sign of the times, they've also gained a Gen-Y misspelling and are known now as "dollz" (usually) to their avid collectors.
Something of a rarity online, dolling is a computer graphics-oriented culture of women who value positivity, kindness and sharing. Dollers range in age from elementary school girls to grandmothers. Online, where young men tend to attract most of the attention for graphical artistry in video games, Photoshopping and related media, the dollz subculture is a breath of fresh air far apart from the frenzied demimondes of CounterStrike mods or "tourist guy" Photoshop contests. Like Photoshopping or game mods, however, dolling responds with lighting speed to trends in popular culture. It is more than an opening into an alternate dollhouse universe; it's yet another window into the zeitgeist.
But what, exactly, are dollz?
"Dolls are essentially little drawings of people," says Jessica, a 15-year-old student from Rotherham, U.K. A new doll is usually brought laboriously into being by hand and mouse pixel-by-pixel -- with or without a naked, mannequin-esque "base body" to draw clothes on. In this most complex method of doll creation true artistry can be found in the intricate shading of individual strands of hair or the barely perceptible texturing of clothes. Another, more beginner-friendly method, utilizes drag-and-drop software that works like the real-world paper dolls or the Fashion Plates of yesterday. In drag-and-drops, users select clothes, hair, and the features of their dollz just as easily as a writer switches on "bold" or "italics."
Whatever the doller's weapon of choice, doll-making is a pixilated game of dress up with an infinite palette where the doller's imagination is the only restriction. "Dolls are Barbie in pixel form," explains 15-year-old New Yorker Yumeioku, owner of Papaya Happy Doll Land. "Some people draw the Barbies, some draw clothes, some do both, and some people only draw completely dressed Barbies, but it's usually all to show off their hair, clothes, and make-up."
Individual dollz take on diverse forms, but most dollers work within established boundaries or types like the gothic Lolita. Some typical categories are divas, brats, mini chibies, xenis, skaters, preps, and weirdos. These classifications are handily broken down at Silver Lining's Doll Dictionary. Fashion-minded dollers often stick with dollz like divas (think fashion model) or preps (Abercrombie models) where the generic base bodies act as blank mannequins to clothe any way they see fit. These dollz have, over the years, had more intricately detailed gowns, dresses, and outfits slapped onto them than a thousand J Los or Nicole Kidmans. Couture for your computer.
Newer, more imaginative doll types reflect a Japanese sensibility familiar to any who have watched anime or played Final Fantasy. The gothic Lolita, the most popular new doll type, is rooted in Tokyo street-culture and is notable for its bloody nurses and leather-clad, bandaged goth girls who, presumably, listen to Bauhaus.
"It's a slightly Victorian style, but has more of a modern flair to it, and was said to be first created by the guitarist Mana of the famous Japanese gothic rock band Malice Mizer," says Washington State resident Jenny, a.k.a. Punky, the creator of our fallen Lolita and collector of Japan's 3-D version of Barbie -- the fittingly named "Jenny." Jenny, who is often credited with starting the Lolita craze in dolling expresses her love of Japanese fashion and culture in endlessly creative designs.
The gothic Lolita's appeal is powerful for dollers because it lends itself to unusual, inventive dollz that stand out in the crowds of preps and divas that litter dolling sites. Another recent strain of Nippon-inspired dollz are Angy Chan's runt-sized, big-eyed "sumomos," which, appropriately, she would like to some day include in a video game.
When exploring the multiplicity of genres and designs in current dolling, the eyes on dollz stand out the most. Their oversized, glassy orbs are a departure from the more Western squint of earlier dollz like preps and divas. Gigantic and physiologically impossible, the new doll eyes are powerfully expressive given the mere inches with which dollers have to work. Discussing her own work, "Sad Eyes" painter Margaret Keane once said, "The eyes I draw on my children are an expression of my own deepest feelings. Eyes are windows of the soul." Intentionally or not, many current dollz exist on the same continuum as Keane's doe-eyed creations. It is more likely, however, that dollers find their inspiration in anime and manga than in a relatively obscure '60s artist. Dolling's influences stretch beyond simply big eyes or anime bodies and you can count among them traditional fantasy art (Amy Brown, "Lord of the Rings," fairies, etc.), fashion photography and design, and comics.
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