Dolls by Madame Alexander

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

Madame Beatrice Alexander Behrman (1895 – 1990) was the daughter of a Russian immigrant living and working in the Lower East Side of New York. Her father ran a doll hospital and she started producing dolls during the 1st World War in order to help her father’s business, which suffered badly as most of the dolls and doll parts it relied on had come from Germany. The earliest dolls were made of cloth, the very first being of a Red Cross Nurse, and on the back of its success, in 1923 she launched the Alexander Doll Company as a fully fledged business.

She’s credited with two major innovations in the doll collecting world - firstly basing dolls on licensed characters from popular culture such as Scarlett O’Hara, and making dolls of living people such as Queen Elizabeth and the Dionne Quintuplets.

In fact she was also responsible for introducing a fashion doll that slightly predated Barbie - 21 inch tall Cissy was first produced in 1955, discontinued in the early 60s and revived for the collector market in the 1990s. A 10 inch version called Cisette was introduced in 1957, which has also been revived.

In the 1930s the cloth dolls were phased out and dolls were made of composition (a mix mainly of sawdust and plaster of paris) and in the 1940s she began manufacturing hard plastic dolls.

Having built up the business to be the largest producer of dolls in the United States, she retired in 1988 at the age of 93 (although her son in law and grandson had really been running the business since the 1970s). But the company floundered without her strong vision at the helm, and in 1995, on the edge of bankruptcy, the Company was acquired by the Kaizen Breakthrough Partnership. They revived the company’s fortunes, by adhering to Madame Alexander’s principles of putting quality in design and finish first.

Dolls based on characters from fiction have been the backbone of the catalogue since the 1920s when Madame Alexander produced Alice in Wonderland as her first doll on launching her business, and the company now produces Madeline, Wizard of Oz and Nursery Rhyme dolls amongst others. They also produce baby doll lines, such as Baby Alexander and Huggums, licensed characters from film and TV such as Desperate Housewives, the Nightmare Before Christmas and Legally Blonde.

They also produce a 16 inch collectable Fashion Doll line – called Alex. Like other dolls of this type, Alex has a fully rounded back story, she’s the editor of a fashion magazine and the series has a cast of characters of fashion writers and designers, which gives lots of scope for beautiful dolls in stunningly detailed costumes.

Tags: alex, Dolls, fashion dolls, madame alexander
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