Emmestyle

Hey, Ken! Meet The New Doll On the Block. Emme, the Anti-Barbie, Helps Keep Size in Proportion.
By Lonnae O'Neal Parker
Washington Post Staff Writer

Susan Jacobs sounds like a kid at Christmas. She talks, she stops, she interrupts herself. She "just can't wait." She's spending Christmas Eve with family and playing with her new puppy, but she's hoping for a phone call telling her Emme is in.

"Oh, if I get my Emme doll" before Christmas, she squeals. Then she composes herself. It's just "I've been really excited about her."

The 51-year-old collector has rooms in her Arlington house filled with more than 50 dolls she dressed and repaired and placed in lighted curio cabinets, but she's never had anything like Emme.

Emme is billed as the only fashion doll that's a plus-size. Voluptuous. Rubenesque. Roomy in the hips and thighs. "Celebrating a Woman's Body," her box boasts. Offering girls of all ages attainable images of beauty and glamour, fans say.

Jacobs ordered the 16-inch doll, based on the plus-size supermodel of the same name, last spring, but because of the West Coast dockworkers lockout, her order has been delayed. So she's been calling the Bachelor II Dolls and Bears shop in Alexandria once a week, and gushing about it with her 16-year-old daughter, who's more like Emme than Barbie.

"I'm just excited about the whole concept," says Jacobs. "I just think it's giving children a better image," she says. "That they can be beautiful even if they're not the Barbie."

For more than half a century, the doll market has been dominated by the 11inch Barbie with her little-bitty waist and itty-bitty feet. Even life-size, she'd wear only a 2 in pants. Then Emme debuted at the American International Toy Fair last February. The collector's edition doll, which became available at FAO Schwarz in October and later at specialty doll stores around the country, sells for $100 to $150, but a less expensive mass-market line is planned for next year.

George Thayer, who owns Bachelor II Dolls and Bears, says he has ordered 30 of the dolls—“when I saw the Emme doll, I knew it will sell." It's partly because of the novelty, Thayer says, but it's also something else—realness. "Emme's slight difference is she looks more natural. Regular-sized. Most people aren't built like some of these dolls."

Emme's maker, Robert Tonner, contends he's "not being political just to be political. Hopefully I'm on a wave of people saying, you know what, there's beauty in other sizes." With more than 10,000 sold, the doll has been Tonner's fastest-selling launch.

Tonner used to work in clothing design in New York's famed fashion district before becoming a dollmaker 11 years ago. He didn't start off wanting to make a plus-size doll; he simply "got tired of dressing the same size 2 body." He saw Emme the model on E! Network's "Fashion Emergency" and thought: "She's so different. She's a big girl. She's at least a size 14 or 16, but she represents fashion."

According to a recent study, more than two-thirds of Americans are overweight. Fashion magazines and clothing retailers have responded to the buying power of this demographic by beginning to offer clothes and images that counter the pencil-thin, stick-straight models. But attitudes about who looks good and what's okay form in childhood, and can take a long time to evolve. And society is, at best, ambivalent about fat acceptance and what constitutes good health.

Emme—a model, host of "Fashion Emergency" and creator of a size 14-24 clothing line-grew up with a stepfather obsessed with weight. "You weren't allowed to have seconds" at dinner, she recalls from northern New Jersey, where she's spending Christmas with family,” or he would weigh me once a week when I was prepubescent." With a black marker, "he drew on my body to show me potential problem areas." Even though Emme was healthy and athletic, eventually attending Syracuse University on a rowing scholarship, from a young age "there was a lot of shame and guilt around 'oh my God, I'm gaining weight.' "

Twice named as one of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People," Emme had been approached about modeling for a doll before, but the designers wanted to change her proportions. Her immediate reaction was no," Emme says. "I refused to do a doll in any size other than my own," refused to minimize her struggles with body image and self-acceptance.

A portion of the proceeds from sales of the Emme doll are going to groups that deal with body image issues. “I want to motivate the mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles to get gifts for their kids that open their minds to new ideas," Emme says. Ideas about who we are, and the kinds of shapes we come in.

Emme, who has a 16-month-old daughter, stands 5 feet 11inches, wears a size 14 or 16, eats in moderation, and is healthy. It's an image of motherhood and womanhood and life she'd like to see more of. "There's a lot of room in the dollhouse," she says.

According to Nikki Goldman, of Poway, Calif., therapist and author of, "Success for the Diet Dropout: Proven Strategies for Women Who Want to Stop Hating Their Bodies," children determine their body images by age 6, and the biggest influence is parental attitudes. Barbie dolls can “set a message of expectation” that girls may try to fill their entire lives, Goldman says.

She recalls herself as a child, a generation ago, not excessively fat, but chubby. Outside the norm.

Images like Emme help establish “realistic ideas for girls as to what to expect of themselves and what to feel good about,” she says. “The doll still has some glamour to her, but it's being presented in a more realistic way.”

Susan Jacobs is carrying on with all the delight of a collector with a new find-a woman with dozens of dolls who is all excited about being all excited again. “I keep talking about it' to my daughter, she says.

She's elegant, and she's pretty and she's got cool clothes.

“I'm going to put it away for when she gets older. I don't want her looking back thinking, ‘Gee, I wish I had gotten one of those.’ ”

Meanwhile, she plans to call Thayer one more time before Christmas. He hasn't gotten his shipment in yet, Jacobs says, hoping for her doll like a child at Christmas.