Trends Through the View of Fashion Dolls

I took the history class, Fashion in the 18^th Century in order to meet the requirement for one of my writing electives. I was interested in this class because I have always loved fashion and I thought it would be interesting to have a historical account of fashion throughout a particular time period. The class had a significant amount of writing, but our final project was to choose a topic related to the course and write a paper and give a presentation on it. I appreciate classes when they give you some freedom in the topic you can choose. I like being able to write on a topic that has some significance and importance to me. When I was searching for topics to choose, I was drawn to fashion dolls because of my obsession with American Girl Dolls as a child. The argument for my paper is as follows, “In my paper, I will be exploring how the trends and ideals portrayed by fashion dolls offer a unique perspective and interpretation on history. Specifically, I will look at larger implications regarding the types of people most influenced by this form of advertising and how the dolls influenced the idea of consumerism in Britain” (Fountain 2).

I enjoyed writing this paper. It was the first time I had ever written a paper that relied so heavily on looking at another medium of evidence such as photos of dolls. It was a learning curve in figuring out how to incorporate this evidence either through description or incorporating the photos themselves. But I think it is a powerful way to add to your argument. The paper progresses through the different things that fashion dolls represent and which dolls exemplify these different trends. It taught me a lot about weaving text sources and image sources together to create a cohesive and successful argument. I think it is a well done and successful paper.