BY DESIGN : Groovy Redux: Low hip-huggers, high-contrast makeup and vinyl anything are all you need to join the ‘90s version of the Mod Squad. : The Role Model : Who Had the Marviest Mod Gear? Francie!
The hair is Jean Shrimpton or Julie Christie or Marianne Faithfull. The eyelashes, full and fake-looking. The figure, waifish enough to be a model. The fashions, the marviest miniature Mod gear ever.
It’s 1966, and Mattel’s Francie doll, 15, has just come on the scene.
And what a scene it was. Vogue coined a term for the people involved in the violent upheaval in fashion, music and other arts: Youthquakers. The grown-up, Babe Paley or Jackie Kennedy ideal of understated good taste for ladies who had married well was giving way to a different aesthetic--revolutionarily conceived outfits in audacious colors and daring cuts for the young, single and not-necessarily rich. If Barbie, Francie doll’s older cousin, represented what every girl’s mother would want, Francie represented what the girl herself would think groovy.
“Young people didn’t want to be associated with established clothing,” says star Mattel designer Carol Spencer, who began contributing doll clothing designs for the company in 1963, when she was in her 20s, and is still at it today. “Really, what they wanted was Mod fashions.”
Established, then, would be Barbie’s wardrobe up to that time: striped dirndl dresses, knee-length sheaths, sweater sets, strapless evening gowns, high-heeled mules or pumps, with calm or classic colors predominating. What young people wanted was what Francie had: short skirts and shift dresses, hip belts, fake fur coats and jackets, vinyl just about anything, flat boots or low-heeled pumps, with throbbing colors and wild prints the rage.
The doll’s clothes, Spencer says, “had to be fashions that a child would understand and relate to. We tried to really make them look sharp.”
Apparently children did relate to them. Francie and her fashions were a hit, Spencer points out, because these were clothes that young girls would see on their older sisters. “Wherever you went, people were dressed in Mod fashion.”
As for looking sharp, there’s no question. In the introduction to his self-published “Vive La Francie” a collectors’ guide to Francie clothes, Los Angeles doll dealer Joe Blitman sums it up wonderfully: “Along with two other same-size dolls, Casey [the inevitable “best friend,” introduced in 1967] and Twiggy [the Mattel celebrity doll, also introduced in 1967], Francie had an extraordinary wardrobe. It was simultaneously wild, innocent, amusing, coy, kicky, demure, silly, impudent, sincere--and insincere. The early outfits were beautifully made, very detailed and highly accessorized.”
Mattel later gave the Mod look to its more voluptuous Barbie-size dolls and to its little-girl dolls, but, Blitman says, the Francie clothes are “probably the purest reflection of the Mod period.” It should be noted that Mod is one of those words that means different things to different people. In doll-collector terms, it means the clothes produced for Mattel dolls from 1967 to 1972, plus Francie’s 1966 outfits.
Fashion buffs seeking designer references will find them readily: There are, among others, the Rudi Gernreich stripes and checks; the Paco Rabanne-ish squares; the Andre Courreges-style boots and vinyl clothing fantasies; the Mondrian/graphic-inspired things exploited by Yves Saint Laurent, Courreges and others; the romantic-looking sheer and full-skirted confections that were popular then too.
More important, though, is that this was the period when “street fashion”--that is, what young people were wearing to rock concerts and art shows and other happenings--really began to take the lead. That played a part in Francie’s wardrobe as well. “We always designed with a specific situation in mind,” Spencer says, “so when Mod fashions came along, we went out to the rock concerts. We went to everyplace that young people would go. And we created clothing that children could play with and associate with those situations. And it was lots of fun, too!”
You could also see some of the “street fashion” trend in the media’s choice of photo subjects.
Starring along with true models such as Twiggy and Shrimpton and hot new actresses such as Christie and Mia Farrow in fashion pictorials were the likes of Faithfull, Cher and Warhol film star Edie Sedgwick. That is, young women who already had a strong fashion look of their own.
In establishing personalities for its new teen dolls, Mattel made sure its young consumers would know these were dolls that were plugged in to all that was new and now. An article on Francie and Casey in a Barbie magazine from 1967, for instance, has Casey explaining the meaning of camp: “ Camp is an expression given to certain types of fashion, ideas, entertainment, art and so on. These ‘campy’ things are considered by most people to be corny, out-of-date, out of fashion, or just plain ‘out.’ And this is exactly what makes them very ‘in’ to others!”
The idea seemed to be that Francie could be as hip, though she was a bit younger, than the media darlings. Yet for all the fashion sophistication, there is an air of the naif about her. “Actually,” Blitman points out, hers is “a very schizophrenic wardrobe. Part of her is sweet and innocent, almost like a Catholic schoolgirl, and the other half is sort of wild and very much a Youthquaker.”
No doubt you could say that about plenty of 15-year-olds at the time. And, after all, she was supposed to be wholesome. She was intended as a toy for children.
As such, unfortunately, she would be subject to the same market forces as any other commodity. Her look would be modified with the times, and as the ‘70s progressed and the Mod look faded, Francie would be phased out.
But that doesn’t mean she’s been forgotten. She’s become an acquired taste among doll collectors. For a doll that sprung from a ‘60s idea of cool, that seems fitting.
