Paper pretties

as an adult, when was the last time you indulged in a childhood pastime?

there are things that we loved to do as kids. a few of my personal favorites, like making papak milo powder and licking ketchup off spoons, are easy to return to every now and then. many others, like playing in the rain, watering the garden while barefoot, or crawling into mom's bed for a dead-of-night cuddle (my patented bunso cure for insomnia or bad dreams), are things that have been permanently buried in the past.

which is why i was over the moon with my latest find at kinokuniya: the paper dolls that i used to have as a kid!

well, i didn't have these ones exactly. what i had was a book of forties fashions by the same paper doll artist. i very clearly remember buying them in goodwill bookstore in the old north mall (now glorietta). i LOVED those to death, and i always wished i could have kept them.

there's a whole line of them: italian designers, spanish designers, fashions by decade from the turn of the century all the way up to the present. and kinokuniya has them all! who needs $300 anti-ageing creams when just i can buy back my little-girlhood for just $11 a pop?

so saturday afternoon was spent cutting out all these precious little chanel outfits. there are over two dozen outfits in each book. i couldn't believe i had the patience to snip, snip, snip all those out when i was a kid. (then again, i also had an extra pair of hands, care of my trusty yaya.)

i actually timed myself -- it takes roughly 5-10 minutes per outfit, which doesn't sound like a lot but feels like a lifetime. now that i'm grown up, i appreciate all the details that went into the artwork, so i was really careful with how i cut them out.

after all the painstaking cutting, i had to have a photo shoot!

lola coco herself in a suit that she wore to a fitting in 1963. i loved that the suit includes a pair of shears hanging around her neck.

the basic, "naked" dolls. the blue striped outfits are a design for a ballet or a play, i forget which.

very early chanel. ang taray ng paper doll diba, may aso. the green dress on the right is the first chanel outfit ever to appear in harper's bazaar, circa 1916.

chanel designs through the roaring twenties:

including a costume design for cocteau's adaptation of antigone (which also featured scenery by picasso). i put the goddess in the plantbox, hehehe.

lola coco got more glamorous in the thirties -- some of my favorites in the book are from this decade.

the skin tones don't match perfectly with some of the outfits, thus creating the dreaded "espasol face" phenomenon, but who cares? these five-inch fashionistas sure made my saturday!