Two springs ago, the Monster High Designer Series was announced, with the exciting concept of debuting brand-new G1-style monster characters reflecting the signature of one designer on the MH team--naturally, senior designer Rebecca Shipman, responsible for some of my favorites, was the first to make a doll for the line: Lenore Loomington, the Gothic garden ghost. And she was revealed to the sound of thunderous...crickets.
Yeah, this doll was not very popular. What went wrong? Shipman is very talented, and the doll boasted a lovely blue gown with a presence unlike anything from the brand previously. An elegant Victorian ghost with a garden theme ought to be a slam-dunk. But somehow, she was giving us nothing.
I wasn't lit up by this doll. My first Designer Series purchase was the second character, 2025's Corazón Marikit. Clearly, the collectors cared little for Lenore, too. She was still hanging around the Mattel shop by late '25, and I myself had resolved to only get her if she went on sale, which she finally did.
There had been a rumor misinterpreting Lenore as the first in a series of garden-themed new designer characters, but she ultimately proved to be the only one with this theme, with the Designer...Duology? not having a theme overall.
Yeah. No new Designer Series doll was revealed at Mattel's springtime media circus this year, which is confusing and disappointing. That doesn't quite confirm the series is finished at two. We probably have to go a whole year with no third doll and no subsequent Spring 2027 announcement to really call it, but it's still a discouraging sign, and I'm leaning toward any hope for that third doll being simple coping on my part. Lenore certainly didn't sell, and Cora didn't either. Maybe Mattel pulled the plug. I want this lineup to continue with more new original G1 cast, though!
Lenore's box is pretty heavy because it's packaged in a four-sided sleeve of window plastic around the real box. This was not immediately apparent, however. The doll is framed in a wide space with some text of the poem written about her throughout the display. The full poem is on the back in clearer formatting.
Lenore is clearly borrowing from Poe with her name, with Lenore being the titular name of a poem of his, as well as the name of the prominent lost love mentioned in another poem, The Raven. I'm not sure Lenore Loomington herself derives heavily or specifically from pre-existing Gothic literature.
I like the illustration around Lenore's name, which eerily superimposes her eyes on top of a flower. Victorian surrealism is really fun, and I want to try making a photo edit to replicate that image.
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| Petals look like a pansy to me--noted. |
The sides of the box juggle the brand logo and release logo like most collector-doll boxes in MH.
The back has Shipman's artwork of Lenore, which looks better than the doll. I still don't think the hairstyle would be ideal, but this level of wave would be much more appealing. I like the designer artworks on these Designer Series boxes!
The doll's poem story is also featured. The verse is a little basic and doesn't seem super artful for reading aloud metrically, but it tells the story of Lenore discovering a magic ghostly garden and choosing to stay by becoming a ghost herself.
I suppose this story could be read with a more haunting and grim Gothic subtext of choosing the beyond over life, but Monster High would never go there.
I would.
Awake upon a grey-green night
As oft she'd spent them, dull and weary
She found no comfort in the dark
Yet there she hid her eyes so bleary
But lo! A shimmer down the hall
Of softest blue and faery white
Invited her to rise and search
To find the home of such a light
She took a lantern in her hand
The flame bent back and forth to guide her
She followed it to find a door
That spoke to something deep inside her
A garden! Filled with pretty things
That shone and glimmered like a jewel
All from some ghostly otherworld
So different from her own so cruel
She loved the flowers and the beasts
Ephemera of greatest splendor
She wanted then to stay therein
She felt the place could truly mend her
And so! She made much further in
She shimmered as she lost the door
Her feet no longer touched the earth
The living lost their dear Lenore
Come on, you can't be Gothic without being at least melancholy.
Here's the box without the plastic sleeve.
And the certificate of authenticity.
The doll's dress is sewn down to the box with several temporary threads to cut. I appreciate that it's not done with plastic tags that will leave jarring holes in the fabric.
The doll's stand base is packaged under the plastic tray that holds her to the cardboard.
The doll stand makes a token effort at ghostliness by being pearly sparkly white and having a long pole that the doll can be raised up so she's "floating", but it's just the Jack Skellington stand pole (I miss Jack; should have kept him!) and a standard waist-grip design that doesn't do the drapery any favors. A year or two later, and Lenore would probably have the thigh-grip saddle stand style used today.
I later discovered swapping doll stands between Lenore and Fang Club Scarah was a beneficial move for each. Lenore's dress is ideal for a saddle display where it can float free, and Scarah works well in the waist-grip without the tippy feeling she had in the saddle.
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| Lenore when I first tested the Scarah saddle stand. |
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| Scarah in Lenore's stand. |
Here's Lenore unboxed.
I have a solid road map for staging Lenore's photo session, for sure!
Lenore's first piece is her headband, which is teal with a spiderweb fascinator accent on her left, topped by pinkish candles.
The piece is held on by plastic tags put through elastic bands wrapped around the piece. It's fine enough without the factory attachments, though it feels a little basic and perhaps not asymmetrical enough for a Victorian accent. I like the fascinator, but maybe it should have been a hair clip instead on the side of her head.
Lenore's hair is black with streaks of lavender and G1-Twyla mint. It's long saran with a heavy side part to her right.
Why on Earth is this her hairstyle??? It's so out of place! I get that long flowy hair is very ghostly and dramatic, but this particular hair shape is not remotely Victorian and it feels terribly unfinished compared to her costume. A center part with a half-up bun and ringlets, perhaps? Or more hair texture? This hairstyle does nothing for this doll's fashion aesthetic, or her design appeal, honestly. We can make her grander without losing her ghostly flow, I'm sure. Maybe Shipman didn't want to age her too much, but is she supposed to be a teenager? Nothing in her poem says she must be.
The hair fiber is a bit puffy, dry, and unruly, and whether it's damaged, or when it got to be, is unclear, but it's a bit disappointing.
Lenore's face may not be a big standout, but it quite pretty in its execution.
Lenore's body color is a pearly greyish white similar to the Haunted ghosts and Ari Hauntington, but less translucent in effect and more iridescent. Her face has a bluish shading mask over the eyes. I've never understood the MH fixation with this kind of shading for ghost faces (the Create-a-Monster Ghost, Spectra as Polterghoul, and the Haunted transformations), but here, I think I finally do. This shading is much subtler and gives the doll more of a glowy, translucent illusion. The other ghosts way overdid the contrast and saturation of their masks, which looked silly. Lenore has wide pink eyes with pink and purple eyeshadow, and glittery tears pooling under both eyes--an oddly eerie touch which I appreciate. She has a dark lip like Shipman dolls often do, and lavender eyebrows. The head mold is evidently new for Lenore, but doesn't have anything that strikes me as super distinctive or recognizable. If I had an archive of the brand's head sculpts without vinyl coloring or paint, Lenore might be among the last I could identify. (I'd love that kind of quiz.)
Lenore's earrings are symmetrical hoops that look a bit like lanterns, using the same teal color as the headband and vine accents.
Over her chest, Lenore has a harness-like viny vinyl beaded wrap with asymmetrical spiderweb weaves and a bow on the front. This slides around both arms and fastens in back with a pin that presses down into the loop on the other side.
It's a bit like the Haunted chain pieces, but less stiff and less clunky. I think this is actually the first traditional ghost in the brand to sport zero chain iconography. (Adjacent monster types like phantom and banshee not counted.)
The dress itself is the main piece of the doll. It's a lovely royal blue color and is semi-sheer, which is appropriate for a ghost. The piece is sewn with a wide vintage neckline and puffed sleeves with very long wide trailing ends.
The trim on the dress is black and glittery, and turns into dots on the sleeves. I don't like how glitter stiffens fabric, and it hampers a bit of the drapery potential, though the base fabric itself seems capable enough and the glitter isn't ultra-stiff. This is nowhere near as atrocious as Casta Fierce's glittered dress.
The sleeves are pinched together below the doll's wrists using small black plastic tags. I don't know if this is intended to be kept after unboxing the doll. Surely, they'd be sewn if this was intended to be permanent? Not sure.
I opened these tags later because I refuse to honor plastic tags as proper doll clothing assembly technique. It's also insulting to see after the dress was sewn to the box with proper thread. There's been worse. Can you believe the old collector-edition Draculaura doll's top hat was held on with tags and had no headband, comb, or any way to keep the hat on otherwise? (I wish I had gotten that doll when she was cheaper, though!)
The bodice of the dress has a black netted layer, which continues into a waist frill. The skirt has a long train that, again, begs for a saddle stand, and features Victorian illustrative garden motifs with some spooky touches.
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| I like the moth! |
The (frankly, jarring) black straps at Lenore's neckline belong to a simple slip dress layer. This has a sweetheart neckline and lace trim.
The neckline is not sewn properly to sit symmetrically, and the straps don't look good with the overdress. Not fully sure this layer was required--not as a full dress, at least. A skirt would have sufficed for modesty. The slip dress did help Lenore stay better aligned on the Scarah saddle stand cradle, though.
Lenore's boots have clip-on vine wraps of their own and the boots themselves are translucent magenta with some Victorian buttoning, cutout heels, and platforms that look like magical mist or billowing tresses--there's no figural element like a head or face, though, so if it's hair, it's not attached to anyone.
The vine clips are really easy to ping off the boots by accident, and I kind of wish they worked like MH belts instead, with a full loop peg closure. That would make them need to come off before taking the boots off, but they'd stay on much better that way. Haunted River Styxx got that right, and the more times these boot wraps fell off, the more I really came to dislike them.
Lenore released before Monster High fixed the elbow pegs on their G1-bodied modern dolls, so she has the same sticky rotation issues. She also has the similar issue to my Wednesday doll from that year, where her arms weren't fully molded correctly and don't sit fully by the side of the torso when the hinges are bent down their furthest.
Can we have at least one year of no pervasive manufacturing and articulation defects in your dolls, Mattel? Nowadays, the necks don't move well (Lenore actually has this issue too) and the hair is coming out of the factory fried. Biggest doll company in the world and you can't control your quality.
Lenore's accessory is a spooky lantern which is oddly similar to Neon Frights Twyla's...and I'm honestly a little surprised it's all new since they're so similar.
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| Lenore's lantern. |
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| Twyla's lantern. |
Lenore's lantern is larger and not glittery, and has a clip-on vine accent, as well as two open sides instead of one.
While NF Twyla was a glow-in-the-dark-themed edition, only the purses, necklaces, and boots of that series were glow pieces, so that didn't extend to Twyla's lantern. In addition to Twyla's eyes, which lacked glow, I felt the glow effect should have at least been given to the lantern's candle. Lenore's lantern actually does this!
None of the rest of the doll glows, and she doesn't do a lot under blacklight.
One thing I always liked about Lenore was the fact that she gave us the first new G1-styled pet (at least, the first released as a figurine) since 13 Wishes! (Haunted featured Vandala's pet cuttlefish Aye in the animation but not the toyline.) Unbelievably, this pet's name is not provided (guess Mattel wanted to spare themselves a trademark) but she's a spooky azure spider with candles on her back.
I miss the G1 pets, man.
It looks like the gradient of the legs is done by casting the pet in black, then spraying the blue on. This leaves the underside looking dirty as a result.
The legs and underbelly are actually a separate piece from the top half of the abdomen, and the head and candles appear to be their own separate pieces, too. So the legs are cast black, but the head and abdomen are cast azure.
I spent a small eternity trying to reconcile Lenore's hairstyle. I tried recombing her hair to a center part, but she wasn't rooted that way, so it didn't look great, and common center-parted hairstyles of the era seemed beyond my technical capability and I was getting frustrated. After a long time experimenting, I finally got her in a style I liked. It's basically just a half-ponytail tied up and to her side, which ended up forming kind of a bouffant and color-blocked her hair streaks in a really tidy way. It made her look more fancy while keeping the ghostly billow of long hair, and her headband could slide under the bouffant to sit more on the side of her head opposite the ponytail, thus looking, flatteringly, far less like a headband. I also took away the slip dress and put a spare Create-a-Monster Vampire pencil skirt on Lenore to help her with the saddle stand. This lets her look like she has no feet with the high-low hem!
Despite having to settle on a really simple hairstyle after a lot of frustration, it's a dramatic improvement. This is the haunted Gothic lady the dress wants to be worn by. This is the elegant fancy ghost doll I want! The shapeless unstyled side part just had to go. I don't know if this is like G3 signature Catty where I felt "anything but the factory styling would be better", because some of my ideas for Lenore hair reshaping weren't panning out or might not have suited her, but it does feel like the weakest possible option was taken when finalizing her. That hairstyle was a major factor in my dismissing her for so long. I think the new hair also makes it easier to appreciate Shipman's trademark design strengths in Lenore's face, with the dignified sculpt and the Shipman vintage dark lip really shining after restyle where I found the face nothing more than pretty previously. The pale face being uncovered also lends it more ghostly Victorian stark contrast against the curtain of black hair.
Unfortunately, when trying to trim a stray thread in her right sleeve, I missed and cut a small hole in it. I glued it shut, but to hide the pretty obvious repair, I popped Neon Frights Twyla's choker around the arm as an extra jewelry piece that matched her.
A poisonous-plant printed tea towel made a fair backdrop for Lenore, if not a gloomy one.
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| Gosh, she can be stunning! The hair tie did so much work! |
My other goth garden ghoul, Amanita, is in fairly good company with Lenore, too.
I think the second edition of Amanita would match Lenore better with her blue tones and daintier look.
I got Lenore well ahead of the ideal time to photograph her, and even did her review/restyle work well ahead of time, but by May, I figured it was green enough to stage her shoot. I heavily followed my work with Garden Mysteries Twyla, though Twyla's 2025 photos were taken at a later point of the year and her greenery was a bit more developed. I still have plenty of fake flowers, and I added the eyeball plants from my Garden Mysteries Draculaura shoot as well as the eyeball flower I finally used in a shoot recently with my last look at Venus dolls. I used blacklight to catch some of the colors, though it didn't work well on Lenore herself, so I was careful where I cast the light, like with Twyla. I found that Lenore looked best with a full spectrum of garden colors, and differentiated her pictures from Twyla by catching the green color of the plants as part of the photo palette, making them look oddly luminous in the dark by shining white light on them and showing their true color, with a bit of color-boosting in post as well.
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| Twyla's scenery all directly matching her palette for a moody cool fantasy twilight. |
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| Lenore shot with a bit more pop for a vivid nighttime garden of wonders. |
The spider not being clearly visible bugged me a bit, so I tried a couple more shots, but they weren't the winners.
I would have done my typical Pepper's Ghost photography setup, but it's finicky to do with a small pane of glass, and then I ended up crushing the pane underfoot anyway (no injuries!) so that solved that. All corporeal photos!
I then staged her drinking tea. The plush vintage doll chair is going to be a worthy investment, and the purple Kelly Alice teacups and saucers came in handy here, too.
I promise a full discussion of the Kelly dolls and their role in my journey for making the Alice in my second Hatter Madness post is coming, but one of the ideas from that post is still unresolved.
Here's a few more garden portraits.
If this hairstyle and these photos had been used to market Lenore, I would have been obsessed with her immediately. The sterile promo photos and the poor hairstyling choice did her no justice.
Then I staged a photo with eyes superimposed over a flower, matching the box art and the Victorian photo-surrealist aesthetic I found in the visual. I don't have real flowers that match the illustration, and had to use a picture of human eyes, not Lenore's, for the right Victorian trick-photo look, but I like the result.
It's always fun taking photos where a doll is the subject without actually appearing in the frame.
Then I did some photos with Lenore as if she's inside her lonely mansion.
And some simpler portraits.
Here she is with the second, and perhaps final, Designer Series doll, Corazón. Cora's hair has been tied up and trimmed a bit since it was so messy and was constantly caught in her wings.
I like both dolls and both do cool things, but I couldn't call either perfect character designs as released and the two share a lot of problems in the toy experience. Lenore and Cora's hairstyles aren't ideal, with Lenore's failing her aesthetic and Cora's being a nuisance, while both dolls have unruly hair fiber that is not very pleasant. Their color palettes also have plenty I'd change and don't feel appropriate for collector dolls. Both dolls' stands are disappointing. Lenore's is nothing more than a tall pole which does nothing to serve the dramatic drape of her dress, while Cora's is brilliantly envisioned for her splitting waist, but doesn't perform as well as it should. Her upper body/hair weight constantly tips her upper body clip out of a level position when it's supposed to be secure no matter how it's turned, and the waist clip itself is a little insecure and her torso can rock back and forth and might fall out. I think Cora needed the solution of some action figures or mini BJDs where her upper half would have a hole in the back under the wings, which a rod on the stand plugged into tightly, rather than using a waist clip. Both dolls have fiddly pieces that fall off a lot--Cora's hair ornament and Lenore's boot wraps are not easy to keep in place. There are improvements with Cora. She was the first doll I got where I noticed Mattel had corrected their ways and restored the elbow peg joints to the perfect functionality of the first Creepro dolls--Lenore was cursed by releasing in the period of faulty sticky elbow joints. I also think Cora's packaging is much better-designed with its inventive display gimmick allowing in-box collectors to enjoy her unique body functionality. Lenore's box is pretty, but could have gone more authentic for her Victorian vintage look (it's a rather modernist box design) and could have been smaller. Cora having a stand specifically considered for her is also a positive. The right stand for Lenore does exist, but debuted after her doll.
As it stands, I can hardly act shocked if the Designer Series killed itself quickly. It would be fair to call Lenore the first nail in the coffin for the Designer Series in addition to being its debut, and Cora didn't quite pick it up. The dolls feel like less than the displays of their artists' heights than they should be. Rebecca Shipman does great work, but Lenore feels more like a Shipman doll with a hair restyle. Glenda Chiu is responsible for the doll that hooked me forever, but Cora, while being a lovely cultural tribute, has some pretty questionable color clashes and a hairstyle that also feels ill-suited to her doll experience. The designs as rendered aren't good enough hooks for buyers, which showed, and even then, the quality just isn't right on with either doll. If we got a third designer doll, I might have to expect another cool character with a hairstyle that's not right for them, done in messy saran, and with the palette including colors I disagree with.
I might end up preferring Lenore for now. While I was able to enjoy Cora's factory design more, Lenore restyled gave me a better experience than Cora untouched. I think Cora really might need a reroot so her hair can be nicer fiber. I could eliminate the jarring purple or trade it for red so her palette can be tamped down and more coordinated, and I could also repaint her earrings or bracelets or replace them with something better coordinated, perhaps pieces from the Ghouls' Getaway line. Honestly, the purple might be my bigger issue than the neon yellow, and I'd do the hair color idea first to see if that was the only palette problem that needed solving. I may also see if it's possible to tighten the waist-clip joint in her doll stand. I want to keep her true while making her more harmonious and better to handle.
I don't blame anyone for never looking twice at Lenore Loomington. What was designed wasn't cohesively compelling, and what was sold wasn't too rewarding for the consumer experience. But there is a lovely, haunting doll in Lenore if you have the eye to bring her out, and I'm delighted with the work she gave me. She deserved to be a better doll, and I think I was right to only purchase her at a very late discount, but she has real potential.
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