WASHINGTON — A slip of the scissors and off comes a foot. A nick and there goes a finger. A wrong snip and a tab that would have held up her dress disappears. Paper dolls, fragile though they were, ...

Here’s some of what Arabella Grayson has learned about black paper dolls: Mid-1700s: Rich ladies in England and France make tiny paper dolls in their own images. 1810: Little Fanny, the first ...

Paper dolls, a vital part of children’s lives and fashion culture for generations, have always been meant to be instructive: to teach young women and girls how to look and behave. But, from the start, ...

Eighteenth-century iterations of paper dolls — hand-painted figures marketed to wealthy Europeans — were nearly as rarefied as the real-life versions of the towering headdresses and ruffled gowns they ...