RESTYLE ICONS: The Beautiful Grotesque!

This was something of a personal challenge to myself, because of all the Monster High characters whose executions didn't connect with me, Rochelle Goyle may be the concept with the most appeal to me that missed the hardest.

I love the idea of a gargoyle monster, but Rochelle...

Official artwork of signature G1 Rochelle Goyle.

Well, first, let's talk about her monster type. Gargoyles are ornamental sculptures featured on medieval buildings such as cathedrals. Technically, "gargoyle" is a term that can only be applied to statues that serve as water conduits to clear the rooftops after a rain. "Gargoyle" is etymologically related to "gargle", so only the sculptures that have openings to serve as runoff water pipes are actual gargoyles. Nonfunctional sculptures adorning a cathedral are called grotesques. But over time, "gargoyle" has turned into a specific monster type-- a horned draconic or devilish humanoid beast made of stone, which watches over buildings as a guardian. I like gargoyles. But Rochelle...

I can ignore the way they overplayed her French nationality. I don't love how so many G1 characters felt flattened by a culture-first portrayal and visual design, but that's not why I didn't seek Rochelle dolls out. It's the colors that bug me, and how they're used. Where do pink and blue come in for a rock creature? And what business do they have in any remote way being her hair colors? I gather this is derived from the vivid coloration of a cathedral's stained-glass window, since that's a clear motif that features sometimes in her clothing, but it simply doesn't look good to me as gargoyle hair. The hair kills the visual for me on almost all of her dolls. So where do I even start with a Rochelle to make into something I like? Well, how about Love in Scaris?

Cropped stock photo of Rochelle from the Love in Scaris two-pack.

The reason I've always been warmer to Love in Scaris Rochelle than her other dolls is due to her hair color. Atypically for her, her hair is heavily mint-toned (Twyla's typical color) with pastel pink in the back. It's a reverse color balance of her Ghoul Chat doll's hair. I never understood how completely and blatantly un-stony Rochelle's hair looked in its usual vibrant pink and blue tones, and I found the colors to feel really heavy and unpleasant on her. Here, though, I think the hair makes more sense. The dominant mint is the color of dry lichen you'd see on old stone, and that's a brilliant concept--a gargoyle's hair would totally be made of moss! Why the heck couldn't this have been her standard hair color?

This isn't the only Rochelle whose hair was like this, but the other was from the Haunted line, and that doll was more translucent and had a ghostly faceup, so she's not really a suitable base for my personal definitive Rochelle Goyle.

Any Rochelle on the aftermarket is tricky, because it seems like none come with her detachable wings without being fully complete and pricey, and the wings themselves don't come cheap to replace. But I managed to find a nude wingless Love in Scaris Rochelle for so cheap I needed to take that deal, and then purchased an incomplete lot of Scaris: City of Frights Rochelle's stock plus her head and wings so I'd get the wings, the beret, and some clothing pieces and the suitcase. It was a better deal to get the wings along with other things I could use than to get them alone for the same amount of money. 

Here's Rochelle as she arrived. Her hair was untied and swept backward.

While I never liked Rochelle's signature hair colors, I did like her signature hair style, so I decided to make some bangs for this doll. I pulled some hair forward and boiled it into its new shape.

Rochelle post-hair reshaping with damp hair, wearing placeholder ILF Scarah clothes.

I also decided to change her faceup to make her feel more stony. I stayed within the lines to maintain her trademark shy expression, but I changed the colors so her eyes and eyebrows looked more like carvings than organic human features inexplicably on top of stone. I blacked out the light reflections, and made her irises, sclerae, and brows grey, and I added mint over her eyeshadow and changed her lip color to the same to play down the pink, remove the blue, and emphasize the mossy lichen concept as the way Rochelle achieves hair and makeup. I did put some pink back in on her eyelids to keep the color in there, but I had it now as the minority to emphasize that Rochelle has to consciously add dye and makeup to get her pink colors--naturally, my Rochelle is just grey and lichen-mint. 

I think these alterations make her much more believable as a living statue now, without sacrificing her personality. And if Robecca and Elle can go harder into looking fully artificial, then Rochelle deserved that kind of treatment, too. It was MH's choice to make gargoyles beings of literal stone, so I'm just bringing that forward.

I find it easier now be charmed by Rochelle's gentle face and stony details without such distracting colors and jarringly organic features. I think the character is very beautiful and sweet, and these alterations take out all of the aspects that confused me. I also love her unique white and-black speckled plastic to give her a stone appearance. The effect looks good, and it's totally variable and random, so every copy of any Rochelle is unique based on how the speckles got distributed within each body's pieces. This means some Rochelles may have more distracting or less flattering specks than others, but I like this idea a lot and this copy looks nice to me.

I also went back in and added cracks to her irises for more detail.

Clothing the doll was trickier. I only really felt like the beret and stockings from the Scaris parts lot her wings were coming in would be useful for this doll...and then I realized the stockings would benefit someone else even more! So what do I put her in besides?

Well, the really challenging thing about my vision for a stony, mossy Rochelle is that kids' doll brands are invested heavily in color, because duh. Unfortunately, that means there's all but nothing you could call grey in the MH/EAH doll clothing assortments--particularly not for the girls. I was more pressed for solutions with this idea than any other. What was out there that would complement this doll--old-fashioned and primarily grey and mint, with a little pink in the minority of the palette?

And then I saw Bunny Blanc, the Ever After High daughter of the White Rabbit from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. 

Mattel stock photo of signature Bunny.

Bunny had a grey waistcoat, a mint skirt covered in clock faces and spirals (accidental invocations of ironwork and clock towers!) and trim with pink accents on the bottom of the skirt. Yes. This was it.

The Bunny Blanc stock arrived faster than I expected it to. 

I tried the dress on Rochelle, but the white fur inside the collar area swallowed her neck up, and with the piece already being sewn for a shorter doll than her, that only made it feel more comically undersized. I took sewing scissors and cut as much of the fur down as I could. 

Rochelle is modeling my repainted Dracubecca umbrella. It looks good with her,
and she earned it for being the doll who helped me realize how the piece was 
designed to be held! 

To cover the neck, I decided to take the EAH Spring Unsprung Kitty collar I'd gotten with a copy of that doll I purchased for the coat piece (I don't honestly know if the project I'd planned for it will work; it's kind of in limbo now). The collar's dry-brushed antique look and minty blue colors work really well for an aged mossy gargoyle and match her eyeshadow, and the collar covers the trimmed fur completely while replicating the dress's collar effect in a way that works better with the character and costume. 

The collar's more like oxidized copper, but old statuary is old statuary!

I think this assembly helps emphasize Rochelle's special appeal as a very sweet and gentle, almost storybook-fantasy monster in a crowd of more fierce and edgy ones. This look for the character is very charming and visually appealing to me, while landing a wildly different vibe from, say Operetta. And I love both for what they are.

There was one other issue with the costume that maybe you caught already--the Bunny Blanc stock I received was from her cheaper rerelease, and thus, the dress cut costs and lacks the plaid trim at the hem. This means the skirt doesn't have the pink accents I was relying on for color balance, and it ends up just that little bit shorter as well. I decided to buy another copy of the dress alone, ensuring this time it was the original version. That would let me cut it down to double-skirt Rochelle's costume like I did for my Create-a-Monster Witch. Doing so would fix the color balance, give it more fancy old-fashioned charm, and also make the outfit longer so it would look more natural on her fame and maybe remove the need for leggings. And it'd make her a little more deluxe, too. Why not? I want my ghouls to look great!

Here's the second dress--the original edition.

And here it is cut down to add a second tier to Rochelle's costume.

The clock purse is getting repainted black.

The costume reminds me of a banker, and the clock element works for a gargoyle, but also lends a new idea to her personality--the idea of Rochelle being very regimented and scheduled as she takes her guard watch very seriously, in multiple aspects living her life by the clock.

Then I got the Scaris stock--her pink dress, her striped tights, her beret, her suitcase, her wings, and one shoe. I had to order another pair to get both and my reluctance to do that left Rochelle waiting for a long time to be complete. But now she is. And here's the full look I ended up with!

And since I had such success with outdoor photography on my previous post, I thought I'd take Rochelle out too. I don't have any Gothic rooftops to perch her on, but I do have concrete stairs at the back door, so...

It's brilliant the way the beret slots onto her ear to stay on.

This vintage-style photo is unedited! The sunlight was so yellow, I had to edit the other outdoor
pictures to be more true-to-life!

I'm really happy with the tone and cohesion I achieved with this project. The wardrobe came together beautifully while all remaining in colors that have been on official Rochelle dolls, and the colors on this one doll all match perfectly, with the collar pairing with the eyeshadow and Bunny and Rochelle's shared pink and mint matching exactly. Her look feels very 1930s or 1940s chic (or even older) in a way that doesn't get explored by real MH costumes much at all, and I like how fancy and deluxe the costume feels. It's pretty formal and extravagant, but it makes sense for her. I also think it passes as French couture nicely without having to have stereotypical horizontal stripes or neck scarfs thrown in. 

The heaviest alterations I made were the changing of her hairstyle to reflect signature's, the painting of the accessories to black, and the changing of her eyes to look more stony, but overall, this is a design that a real Rochelle could have had, and it's just a few steps away from the official looks. I'd have been much more enthusiastic about a gargoyle doll with this kind of execution, foregrounding greens and greys to look more mossy and rocky, and not having overly organic features. Through designing the doll, I also accidentally found an angle to reframe her personality as someone always living on the clock which worked beautifully with architectural and personal aspects of her concept. 

This isn't the Rochelle we got, but it's the Rochelle that made me appreciate what we were given a lot more.