This week we’ll start a new series of paper doll posts featuring some of Naomi’s vintage paper dolls. There are quite a lot of them so I’m going to post the photos in batches starting with Barbie and friends. This batch is from the early 1970’s. Naomi has a whole folder full of plastic sleeves containing various paper dolls and outfits and I haven’t yet been through them all to match the doll with the outfits so for this first post I thought I’d show you a group of Barbie’s, Ken’s and PJ’s and feature the outfits of one of them. In succeeding posts I’ll show you some of the others with their outfits.

All of these are vintage  paper dolls not repros but have been well looked after and only have a few creases from being handled. Naomi and I often used to draw extra clothes for our paper dolls and I know how that reclining PJ would have annoyed us as being hard to draw for. She is very nice though and hopefully has plenty of outfits of her own in the folder somewhere. Although I did not see it marked on the dolls I think that Barbie paper dolls were all manufactured by Whitman under licence from Mattel. The dolls are marked Mattel with the date and the doll’s name at the bottom.

Now here is our featured Barbie and her clothes.

Who remembers when we wore things like this? Maxi’s, mini’s, flares, ponchos. This is a great set, it even has the individual boots. Although there is a lot here I think that there may be a few pieces missing as there are a lot of tops but only one skirt and no separate pants. After a quick search I have not found any pictures of other pieces but that doesn’t mean there weren’t any others.

Now for Barbie’s close-ups.

You certainly got value for money with those sets of dolls, so many outfits to mix and match. I actually remember this hairstyle and make up being very popular. I’m sure that our slightly older cousin tried this look.

I’m pretty sure I saw some Ken outfits as I was putting these back in their folder so we might take a look at those next time.