#cleabella

Here is ‘Jamaica’ Clea Bella with actor feet, redressed in Somers & Field ‘Picadilly’. The SF shoes don’t quite fit Clea’s feet, but fortunately her own robin’s egg blue slides look good with this. 

The doll is in very nice shape, stringing still solid, with vinyl in quite good condition and no discoloration of her hard plastic torso. Her little haircut is especially good, with really nice bangs (dolly bangs on dolls with rooted hair are normally.... awful). 

I forgot how much I loved her silly little face. Glad she’s home. 

Whomst?

This is a Clea Bella doll, created by Christina ‘Bogie’ Bougas. This funny darling creature is 16″ tall, and was created at the height of the craze for fashion dolls of this size, inaugurated in 1995 by Mel Odom’s Gene doll. 

I collected this size and style of doll from 1996 right up to the mid-2000s, when Asian ball-jointed-dolls began gnawing on my soul. 

And rightly so: In a lot of ways, compared to the free-for-all that was BJD collecting in the oughts, the 16″ fashion doll scene was... confining. The narratives woven around these little creatures (especially Tonner’s Tyler and MA’s Alex) were pedestrian, strictly ‘Sex and the City’ in their orientation. With the exception of Mel Odom’s genius characters (SHOUT OUT TO TRENT AND MADRA), all these doll people seemed very straight, very conformist, very acquisitive, and somehow... very sad. 

Clea could not have been created without this 16″ fashion doll context, but she was really different--more like Gene in her beginnings, in that you could see the marks of the artistic vision very clearly. The sweet, eager face; the wonderful weight and handling properties of the material she was made from; the beautifully made clothing; the idiosyncratic, obsessively detailed storylines! I will never forget meeting Bogie and Clea at IDEX, and handling an artist proof of one of the ballet-feet dolls--the first ballet-styled fashion doll in its size. (The little shoes...! BJD collectors will understand what I mean when I talk about how realistic those little ballet slippers were.) 

20 years have passed since I first held a Clea Bella; the (Western) doll collecting world has moved on from that era. And so of course, now that she’s become somewhat scarce on the ground, I’ve decided to take up Clea collecting as a sideline. 

I already have a few beautiful limited editions.... somewhere; I cannot for the life of me figure out where I put the boxes. More anon. But I just picked up this cutie from eBay. Note the Liza Minelli haircut!

Since Clea Bella is 20-something years old, I anticipate a lot of staining to manage, a lot of restringing to figure out, and hopefully not too much sticky vinyl. When this new one arrives, I’ll post an update about her condition.