What Fashion Victims Sadie COULD Have Been, Part 2: The Custom Doll!

In the first part of this project, I detailed the concept and the doll I was building my fashion Sadie upon. Here, it's the customization and result!

There will be some exploration of mature clothing themes in this post, mixed with slasher horror imagery.

To begin working on transforming my repro-1960 Barbie doll, I first pulled her head off. This exposed her neck peg, which is not jointed. It can be rotated within the torso neck socket, but this has no articulation function and the peg is tight enough that the doll head does not spin the neck peg when turning. The peg was flanged with at the top to keep the piece on. I just trimmed the flanged part off to make the removal and replacement of the head even easier. I then got the head bald and wiped some of the face paint that I knew needed to be gone before repainting, while leaving the sections I could color over as guides. I took off the eyebrows and blush as such while leaving the lips and eyes to make sure I was getting the repaint within the original template. I also took off the red nail polish. I bent the earring pegs to flatten the flanges in so the earrings would be single pegs that could go in and out of the piercings.

I also sanded down her worst molding seams and trimmed her head's neck socket and the neck peg so I would not need to vigorously squish her head to pop it back on. I wanted to ensure her repaint wouldn't be harmed by deforming the vinyl. 

I sanded the body because I like the less plasticky matte texture, but her limbs will need MSC to gain that flatter look thanks to their flexible material.

For the Spotlight dress, I cut the Barbie rose off the frill and replaced it with a Sadie rose taken from her Return bouquet. 

The wire stem made it a no-sew job, too--I just poked the shortened stem through the netting and bent it back against the head like a pin badge! I then added an elastic loop to give the dress a halter neck and keep it up. 

It invalidates the necklace, but I wasn't sold on the beads anyhow, and they didn't work with the After Five dress for me, either, so those just got put aside. I later glued on a tiny flat-backed pearl accent from a Rainbow High skirt, placed at the bottom of the halter strap to put just a touch of Sadie white into the outfit. Sadie's never worn all black, and it'll complement the earrings. The halter pearl did need to get re-glued at one point later on.

To dress the very long neck and make it look better in After Five mode, I took a page from the official fashion Sadie and fashioned a black choker from another glued elastic loop. 

Retro Barbie wearing After Five has a bare neck by Mattel's standards, but I think Sadie really needs the choker to look right in this dress.

The doll's head popping off will make these costumes' neck elements easy to remove. 

I splattered some red stains onto the pink scarf, since it was only proper for it to be a bloody rag, and I took the Ghostface action-figure kitchen knife out of the arm socket of the Left Out Doll I made, Jacq-O'-Line, to be an accessory for Barbie Sadie. It fits her scale well and she can actually hold it pretty decently with her hand mold, even bare-handed. The handle fits in when turned with the wide side between fingers and thumb. I repainted the blade to get rid of the black blood I'd put on it, but decided the blade could be bloodless if the scarf was bloodied, as if she'd wiped the blade on it.

I realized an elastic loop I'd tested which turned out too large for the choker would instead work beautifully as a garter for Sadie to strap her knife into, in lieu of a purse.

Ouch.

Usually, a woman's thigh dagger is a sultry stiletto, but I love the unhinged energy of a glamor lady being strapped with a slasher's kitchen knife instead. This won't work with the tight Spotlight dress, where she'd have no hope of pulling the knife on anybody while maintaining her glamor and preventing the dress from slicing, but it's perfect under the After Five piece.

I haven't even really turned her into Sadie yet, and I'm already obsessed with her! These old Barbie dolls had something!

I think glam, cheeky horror-sexy gags like this would have been a more fun direction for Fashion Victims Wave 1. It's also a fun way to reinterpret both the classic Sadie knife and roses as wearable accents since this doll is not suited to holding or wearing purses (unless they have long shoulder straps, perhaps). The garter knife gag also adds to the layering and detail and polish that gives vintage Barbie her marvelous air of prestige. Even twisted toward evil, I see a little object of wonder.

With the doll bald, the sun hat does gently rest around her crown, but I don't anticipate this being possible with the doll rooted with loose long hair. It's not going in her kit.

I also decided to go ahead with trying that classy grown-up "Bedtime Sadie" idea by ordering real Barbie nightclothes--black underwear and the pink vintage "Nighty Negligee" set's eponymous sheer robe. I don't think such underwear was appropriate to release on a character who was marketed back then as a "Teen Age Fashion Model", and these days, lingerie is unheard of in the playline brand given its target audience, but for an adult Sadie, they do just fine. 

When the bedclothes arrived, they had issues. (Pictures are coming later because I failed to document at the proper time.) There was no marking on the underwear set, so it's probably not Mattel clothing, but the strap behind the bra was very loose, perhaps an elastic band that had long since lost its pull. The panties also had a lot of fraying around the legholes and the leghole edges were separating in large loops. The negligee, meanwhile, had stains, and one of the sleeves had opened fully down one side. I repaired the sleeve with glue and dabbed bloodstains onto the piece to disguise its flaws, added new elastic straps to the bra, and glued the leg area of the panties together as best I could. When the bra goes on now, it's clearly not hugging the underside of the breasts, and I wasn't sure how to fix that. The undergarments are not as flattering as they could be, but the color was most important. The poor quality and fit is what convinces me 1960s Mattel had no hand in the black set's construction. Next to the After Five dress, they're obviously unofficial.

It actually felt like something of a novelty to realize that the undergarments were not (fully) mutually exclusive with the other Barbie clothes. After Five layers over both underwear pieces, but the backless Spotlight dress both cannot conceal, and cannot close over, the bra. It's too tight, but Spotlight can wear over the bottoms. Mainstream dolls usually forgo undergarment pieces either for concerns of good taste or budget (or just making the outfits look sleeker), but I think the ability to fully dress a vintage Barbie in realistic layers adds to the level of polish and refinement I'm experiencing from these old doll clothes. Layering does make the costume harder to take off, though. The underwear made it hard to slide the After Five dress down the hips.

Repainting the face needed to wait until it wasn't inhumanly cold, since I need to spray the sealant outside in my garage while it's open, but I anticipated a fairly quick job once the weather permitted, hopefully with few passes required. Before repainting, I digitally sketched on my bald partially-wiped doll to plan my look. During repainting, I tried to make the doll paler by rubbing white soft pastel onto the body and head, but later, squeezing the head caused the pastel-under-sealant to crackle and become unsightly, so I did the best I could to rescue the faceup and wipe the bare skin that had been lightened while keeping the rest untouched. I'm pretty sure I don't have the finesse required for a great doll repaint even with the right tools, and am once again under the impression that changing a body color is always going to be disappointingly fragile. When sealed portions got scraped away at points, I had to try patching with acrylic paint, which unfortunately chips really easy when put over a sealant layer. I'm not sure there's any winning, but I might have the best personal faceup satisfaction with thinly built layers of acrylic paint over bare vinyl. It's not sealed, and it can be damaged, but it flexes with the doll head and water doesn't touch it. Acrylic is harder to control and apply tidily, but watercolor pencils are hard to build up and sealant seems to only be useful for creating "checkpoints" in a faceup process, but doesn't seem to offer much durability. Durability is a massive concern for me in collecting dolls since upkeep can be so onerous, and if customization doesn't offer me some security that my work will last or can be handled less than ultra-delicately, then it's probably not worth it to me.

Because I wanted to give more interest to the Bedtime outfit, I added some details to Sadie's torso which would become visible with the lighter clothing--there's a closed Y-shaped autopsy scar on her front which I thought would be fun peeking out with her midriff bared, and on her back right shoulder blade is a collage of tattoos with relevant symbols. 

Over time, some of the chest scar has faded or rubbed away, and I'm not sure why. 

I then realized the Spotlight dress will also show off the tattoos-fun! Sadie is one of those dolls who's obviously goth, but never really clearly dead, so I thought adding a more cartoony "this doll is a corpse" detail with the scar would be fun while also playing it into her costume cuts. I think this is a more fun way to mix the horror and naughty themes together in a way that's less jarring and grossly plausible "sexualized corpse". FV' official Sadie looks bloodless and bruisy like she's actually decayed in a way that's pretty uncomfortable. I tried to strike a less serious tone.

I declined to add nail polish back on in black. It seemed too finicky to paint well or keep on.

Rerooting the doll nearly doomed this project. 

Attempt 1 used more hair than I thought would be necessary, and ultimately wasn't successful. The shape I wanted, a retro split-bang tied down behind the head with loose hair behind it, wasn't easy to style (is it ever?) and the reroot eventually fell apart completely in attempting.

Digital overlay planning sketch of the face and the hair silhouette I really wanted.

I was getting frustrated with the flaws in the repaint too, so I ended up stripping the head entirely to base with a total wipe and re-bald. I ultimately didn't document the first face paint attempt in photos; sorry about that. 

This created a brief period of despair. Was there any recovery?

I didn't know how to resolve the hair, but I did a fresh paint job with acrylic and brush-on gloss varnish only and no fickle MSC. It's a little rougher, but I've had some of the fewest frustrations with face repaints done this way, and I actually ended up getting a better result for the face than I had before, much closer to my digital sketch. I think guiding myself with pieces of the base paint had been a reasonable idea for small scale, but it also hindered me--I hadn't been able to get the red of the lips 100% covered up, and while freehanding tiny doll lips is one of my least favorite things to do, I really made it work here, and now there's no red at the edges! I surprised myself with getting it to look as good as it did. It helps that the 1959 head sculpt has such defined features, but without any factory paint anymore, I was still nervous.

Blame the flaws on her beautician mortician!

Even a badly-painted '59 Barbie head is absolutely deadly. The power of a sculpt can't be understated. 

Doing this re-repaint restored a great deal of faith in this project by making me love the doll again.

Now to figure the hair out. I wasn't really sure I was up for the misery of re-rerooting the head, and the bangs line had some breaks between the holes now, so I wondered if a wig was my only option. I ordered one, waited for weeks, and then wrecked it in the dyeing process because the seller had none available in the correct color. That broke my spirit even further and I decided to not think about this for a little while, but it looked like I would be re-rerooting after all.

The rerooting failure and second repaint were in February, whereupon I put this project down for a very long time. Being no great fan of hair rooting caused me to dally, but when I got another Barbie with the 1959 face sculpt to review, I needed to push the Sadie project. I wanted to document my experience with retro Barbie accurately by sharing my first experience through this project first. 

In the meantime, though, I tried another ensemble with some white Mego boots, a white choker, and a Mego jacket layered over the After Five dress for more of a shirt-and-skirt look. It might be too casual for a full career look, but it might work.

I also cut a keychain from a LDD Minis noose as an extra, and tied another, more chic noose from a white doll shoelace.

The net stockings and boots from my pink-dress Masker Masquerade doll also work on Barbie to create the closest possible translation of the canon Fashion Victims costume.

Then, my reroot round two began--in July. I ran out of hair again, but by now, this project was so slow that further waiting was hardly a problem. Looking back to earlier this year, I'm not fully sure how my first reroot went so disastrously, but I think I had a more solid concept of what to do this time. I think the last reroot was less carefully mapped or shaped for the silhouette I really wanted. This time, I worked with a cutoff line for the swooped back "big hair" section at the rear and tried to get the line dense and thick so the hair could form a puff on its own through real volume. I would then tie this hair and get it lifted so that I could root the center-part in front and be able to tie it behind the head with none of the loose hair in the way. Trying to achieve that hair tie was what undid me before. Here's the work on the hair in back.

The result is Divine--with a capital D.

Sadie's not going to be rocking such a high hairline. (I've had an idea of a custom drag-queen LDD named Profane built on the Gluttony sculpts. Maybe I'll do a drawing of that sometime.)

With the revival of my project, I also faced the facts that the underwear I'd gotten was kind of busted and never going to flatter her. I didn't photograph them at the right time, but here they are.

The slippers are Attractionistas Maddie's, transferred to Sadie's kit for the nightwear set. They fit the firm Barbie feet better than Maddie's bendy flimsy ones.

You can see what I mean about the top not fitting Sadie's bust. It can't hug the top and bottom simultaneously.

The elastic straps are my modification.

The less said about the bottoms, the better.

Since this black set wasn't Mattel-original anyway, I had license to order a better unofficial set which appeared to match the body type. I got two sets, actually--one black underwear/gown set and one pink one. That would let me recreate the black underwear and pink gown, or switch the colors if I liked that combo more. Yeah, I'd lost faith in the Nighty Negligee too. Authentic, yes. Quality...not anymore. And it felt too baggy and relaxed for a wicked-sharp sixties woman. This is a nightgown for a lady who's settled down and cozy, not for an unattached and unpredictable Fashion Victim.

At this point, I also revised the Spotlight dress again. The tulle puff above the ankles just wasn't working. Sadie has always struck me as a sleeker, color-blocked girl who would never do tulle or frills, while the cut was just too short to look good. She needs her feet covered, dang it! I want her Wednesday qualities to graduate into Morticia parallels! I looked for what I had available, and ultimately decided to sew the original Shanelle Onyx's Shadow High grey-spectrum dress skirt to Sadie's dress. I trimmed the tulle Spotlight ruffle down but couldn't remove it. Not a problem--while trimmed, the tulle section served as a fair line ending off the dress to transition into the new hem, and I think Shanelle's color-blocked tiers are just sleek enough to be an acceptable ruffle for Sadie. I could have dyed this black, but I liked the gradient bringing white even further into the look, and sticking the rose back in made for a very modernist pop of contrast.

I'm no seamster, and making new clothes is not on the table for me (yet?), but I think sewing is part of my toolkit now for clothing modification. I'm embarrassed now by how much ugly work I've done with glue previously, including the added halter collar for this very dress. I'd have glued the loop closed and then sewn it to the dress if I had a do-over. The way I did it created a light discolored glue patch on the bustline that I needed to disguise with paint, imperfectly.

Sadie's new lingerie then arrived. They're not exactly sewn for the '59 body, as the bras are barely able to close, but the panties fit fine and the look is much better than the pieces I first tried. Here's the black set with the pink robe.

And without the robe.

Here's the opposite. The black bra closes marginally better than the pink.

I prefer the first combo. Black over pink has costume connotations of "spooky but secretly sweet" and that's not my Sadie. This version may be chic and glamorous, but she's one of Satan's girlfriends. The pink undies and black robe aren't going into Sadie's wardrobe/kit at all. They're just in my doll clothes storage. I fixed the selected bra by unstitching one half of the velcro connection and re-sewing it scooched further down that end of the bra so the pieces met properly. Now only one edge of the velcro piece is sewn down, but it works and extended the reach of the velcro.

I worked with the hair over time, and once I got to the front, I received a swift reminder of why the task had broken me the first time. I just had to pick the most difficult hairstyle to shape--that damn plastered-down front parting. This was a test of emotional regulation as much as dexterity. This was still reroot attempt 2, the one with the Divine hairline shown above..and I failed a second time once I got back to the parting. The hair in front just wasn't staying in the holes, and the scalp ripping open along many of those holes didn't help. The fabric glue wasn't reaching the roots inside, and the hair in back was impossible to control and tidy even with a ponytail. I broke again and ripped out the hair a second time.

So. What now?

Well, clearly, this wasn't going to work unless I did the front parting first. Having the hair in back was creating a lot of mess in trying to manipulate the front hair, and the roots may have been preventing me from securing the pieces in front with internal glue. So this time, I started with the front.

Another thing I wanted to address was the ears. See, Barbie's ears are so small and so flat that seemed impossible to pull a tight parting behind the ear. It must go either above or over the ear instead, and this was the look I was building with attempt 2:

The sketched vision I was so destructively attached to, however, had Sadie's ears showing. With the inability to tuck any hair behind the ear, I rethought the rooting and gluing situation. It would be possible to let Sadie's ears show if I pulled the hair at a less steep angle--I just had to cover the area that the front parting wouldn't. To do this, I rooted in some hair above the ear and pulled it backward and glued it flat against her head to fill the gap between the above-ear area and the area the hair "curtain" would cover.

This is the theory of the thing; more hair to properly fill the space ended up in the final result.

I made sure the roots got glued in before pulling the hair tight and gluing the endpoint and brushing fabric glue over the top--then proceeded with the other side. I had the grim feeling a third hair order (and just the third since resuming this project) would be needed to finish the hair in back, but just securing the hair in front would be a blessing.

I couldn't do it. The head was unrootable. The scalp had broken so badly into seams that hair wasn't staying in, the needle was plunging into a crater at the very front, and I couldn't keep the front hair tidy while trying to pull and glue it in place. Then I broke an earring's pearl and I was about ready to call it quits on the doll head. I didn't want to recreate the successful faceup, though, nor buy another doll with parts which I didn't need. 

I looked into repair methods, and found some vinyl glue. Like an idiot, I cut open the back of the head as a way to "discard" it until I walked it back, so that had to be repaired too, but holding the head together with elastics, the repair seemed to work and I began take 4 at rooting this head. Maybe the deathly numeral is lucky in this case.

Reroot four was finally functional. The vinyl glue didn't seem to hold super well, and the back-of-the-head cut I made split open when testing the head back on the body, so I had to superglue that. The gaping hole in her front scalp opened up again, but I got everything in and glued and plastered down without visible structural issues, and what hair did pull back up and get messy didn't cause a whole restart like it did every time before. Wisdom truly would have been to start over with a new head that had less harried scalp holes so I could reroot with a stable scalp pattern and have all the hair confirmed to be in a tiny hole, but I really didn't want the waste. I held off on trying to root the loose hair behind until I came back from vacation. I also didn't think I had enough hair left over, anyhow, but reaching a point of acceptance with the front hair rooting was a massive hurdle.

During this time, I was also thinking of customizing a coffin box to be a carry case. I wanted a nice presentation and storage for the doll, and I'm enchanted by old-fashioned doll trunks which offer little functional closets to hang the clothes in, like the one Billie Eilish is unable to happily play with in the video for her Barbie (2023) song "What Was I Made For?". I emptied a Living Dead Dolls coffin I didn't need. It became apparent the deep body of the coffin was best for installing a hanger rod, and could store a small box for shoes and accessories too, while the shallower lid of the box was where the doll could be tied in.

I needed to make the hangers out of my own wire to fit her dresses well--After Five needed a very wide hanger to not fall out of the shoulders, and Solo in the Spotlight needed a "frame" hanger to slip into and fill the dress since the collar would just slip around the hook and the dress would sway out of alignment with the hanger otherwise. I knew I was onto something, because putting the clothes on the hangers was just as appealing as trying the different outfits on the incomplete doll. It adds to the immersion of the doll's little fashion world and reinforced my belief that this vintage Barbie captured the quintessential appeal of the fashion doll medium. I painted and varnished a small cardboard box for shoes and accessories, with an elastic strap inside the lid to hold the knife, but also considered making a wall hook for nooses and chokers. I ultimately found a pre-painted slightly squatter mini box which worked better and rendered the one I painted unnecessary for this project. I thought of having two boxes--one for shoes, and the other for tights, gloves, underwear, garter, and knife, but the larger box which I put more work into got too in the way of the long extended Spotlight dress on its hanger, so I rethought things.

I tested two coffins in the spray-painting process. My first plan was to paint the box fully pink, but texture issues caused me to get a second box, and the white base layer looked good enough that I thought a fully-white box would be good. I eventually returned to the first box, keeping the pink interior paint and painting the outside white. I had to accept that the texture was not going to be perfectly free of paint globs, and I sanded the final result. I had prepped a dowel with angled ends to be the hanger rod across the inside of the box, and poked a hole in the side where I might put a nail to hold the rod in on one end, but I ultimately ended up gluing it. 

I also tested a fitted fabric-covered foam "mattress" to tie Sadie to inside the coffin lid. It could be laid flat on the ground to play as her bed while the box body stood up as her closet. The foam was too thick, however, and lifted her outside the edges of the lid. I thought it would look tidier and make the box fit cleaner and less likely to cause abrasions if she was fully enclosed in the lid half. To cleanly mount the waist-tie ribbon, I threaded it through an artsy black-and-white button which got glued to the wall of the lid. I constructed some necklace hooks out of glued LEGO assemblies which got affixed to either side of the doll inside the lid, with care that they were inset enough within the coffin walls that the lid would not be obstructed from closing over the body of the box. The garter, if stored away, goes in the closet box so it's not mistaken for the black choker.

With the box colors done and the doll's front hair rooted, I felt like I'd crossed my major thresholds. Suddenly, it felt like the end was in sight and I'd surmounted the obstacles that threatened to doom the whole project to being scrapped.

I'll admit I got myself a little confused about the logistics and tore out the hanger rod because I forgot it wasn't involved at all with whether the box fully closed or not, but I replaced it with a LEGO assembly which was admittedly easier to affix and trust in regarding stability, and the shortening of the rod didn't prevent it from holding everything. The LEGO solution was also only glued at the mounts-- if Sadie and the bar were in contact and blocking the lid from closing, I could take the bar off the affixed mounts for closing it up. This second hanger rod adjustment left some more things to patch up with the box paint, but oh well. I also decided all of Sadie's main clothing pieces needed hangers. Putting the underwear in the white box worked fine, honestly, but folding the net tights was more awkward than I wanted, and I realized the tights could easily be put on a very simple wire S hook threading through the wide-holed netting. Solved. I also made a custom hanger for the underwear, with bars to catch the shoulder straps of the bra and an extension of S hooks which hold the panties. The gloves and garter and shoes and handkerchief can go in the white box. The tights and were too unwieldy and messy-looking in there. I repeated the trick of the elastic knife strap on the interior of the lid. It looks better matching the box color here. I also added the NECA Ghostface bloody Bowie knife to the assortment.

Sadie herself does get in the way of the lid closing fully because she's so close to the height of the lid and her body can't be fully centered by the waist tie. Ah, well. I could add a peg to catch her between the legs and keep her feet from touching the bottom of the lid, maybe? That wouldn't let her be tied in at the right height while wearing her dresses, though. Maybe I should have ordered a stand clip instead to grip her waist, but that could lift her too far above the back wall. 

To give text to the box, I ordered a custom stencil cut from a graphic file.

At the size it turned out, the only placement that worked really well was at the top of the lid. I realized I could replace the dot on the I with a sulfur symbol hand-drawn if I covered the stencil hole. I think the stencil was maybe too thick or too hard to flatten, because take 1 of spraying black was a mess which required a new spray coat of white to cover it all, and take 2 after trying to get it flat and pressed down was still really flawed. The "custom doll" disclosure seemed to be too small, so I decided to cover that up and hand-letter it in cursive. The rest could be spot-tidied with black and white paint and pen. Sealant could hopefully lock in the wet-soluble pen ink before a final clear sealer layer.

I also got Sadie's hair rooted in at last. The back/center of the hair needed a revision to fill it out more because the head was originally rooted to be tied back and hanging loose, the hair looked thin and gappy behind Sadie. When I felt the loose hair fanned too wide around Sadie's head, I did actually pull some aside into a ponytail tied behind her head--ironically, the style I wasn't able to get right for the very front previously. That slimmed the hair silhouette well and I decided not to bother with sealing and gluing the second-stage hair pull. This hair doesn't like to sit without gapping and maybe gel would help keep the backward swoop in shape, but I'm okay with it as it is.

I think impulsively cutting open the back of Sadie's neck hole ruined the fit on her neck peg, and I found it wasn't sitting flush anymore with the top of her torso's neck. Cutting the neck peg down further didn't help, and might have made the issue even worse. I sawed away the factory peg altogether and replaced it with one of my old reliable tiny wooden peg knob pieces glued on top of a 1x1 LEGO round tile, and those two parts completely corrected the issue. 

The LEGO tile came off the neck the first time I tried to pull the head off the new assembly, and I'm glad I was able to tweeze the peg out of her head before it got pushed inside and stuck. I stuffed the hollow of the LEGO tile with a scrap of paper towel fully saturated with glue to hopefully increase the surface area glued to the doll neck, and pressed firm for a good while while the glue was new to hopefully set it more securely. Now, Sadie's head slowly twists on and off the peg and fits perfectly, but I won't yank the head off anymore.

Returning to the box, I began touching up the colors from the spray and stencil work. I also began working on hardware to store the doll stand in the package, since I hadn't thought of that yet. 

I completed the homage to the 1959 Barbie box with painted fashion pictures of Sadie in her different outfits. 

Reproduction swimsuit Barbie in repro box.

Since there's only one doll in this Sadie's canon, the models and hairstyles are all the same Sadie, but it was a good opportunity to show off her three main costumes--a permutation of After Five, the bed set, and the Solo dress. My paintings are smaller than the Barbie originals would have been, and don't match the watercolor or gouache style perfectly. The placement isn't also as tidily symmetrical as it should be, but painting the little Sadies down added color and authenticity to the box design and made me very very happy regardless. To show the variability of the fashion pieces, I drew the Sadies in some ways I didn't actually prefer on the doll herself. I put After Five in the nets and gave her the bowie knife and left off the gloves, while I put the gloves on Solo despite preferring them on After Five. 

With the use of pen and also watercolor paint for the skintone, my box desperately needed a sealant layer, and MSC is the only kind I've discovered that's "dry" enough to not make any soluble pigments bleed and run when you spray it. Other sealants are wet and runny enough to ruin the soluble markings in the attempt to protect them. 

I'd also discovered that my acrylic paints were poor matches for the color and finish of the spray paint that colored the box's base white, so I got the idea to spray some paint from the can into a disposable tin tray and dip into that and brush it on for spot-touching so the white paint would all look the same before the final layers of sealant finish. I didn't want to trust the sealant would disguise any white paint disparities before being proven wrong at the point where it was probably too late to fix it.

Then, at the point of spraying clear gloss over the box, I was set back a few times. Dark particles fell into the paint while I wasn't watching and prompted more touch-ups, and then for one layer of gloss application...I grabbed the white paint can instead. I was able to scrub it off quickly, but not without leaving a white haze over everything that required a lot of touch-up work to restore the color and black tones. Another gloss spray got contaminated after, so I started bringing a large plastic bin to flip over the boxes right after spraying so they could dry without anything falling into the sealant. I ultimately wasn't able to prevent particles from falling into the finish of the box and creating blemishes, but I wanted out and I had to accept paint flaws inside and out to escape this project.

Alright, here's the completed kit! 

Like with too many custom projects, results are below the standard I aimed for, and my first reaction to finishing is overwhelming relief I'm free. Customization is a toxic relationship sometimes, and there are far too few doll projects I've taken on that feel on my level or like they produce results quickly and with full satisfaction. I'll be sharing a couple of more chill and easy dolls I've done in October!

I put no decoration on the sides or back of the box. 

Inside the lid is where the doll is tied in around the waist. She can wear anything, but if sold as a collector doll product, would be most likely to be packaged in her underwear opposite her full rack of clothing, and that would be the only clothing she could wear if I added a catch between her legs to stop her from touching the "floor" of the lid as a correction for the box closing. 

Since I made hangers for all of her fabric clothes except her gloves, and because she can't wear the underwear set under all of her clothes, there's always going to be at least one empty hanger on the clothes rod unless Sadie was tied into the lid entirely nude, which is pretty irregular and improper in the doll world. I think Sadie looks good with the garter and kitchen knife paired with the underwear set for this "default boxed" presentation. I think the black choker could also be thrown into this "base" look, but it changes a lot for me if it's there.

Beside Sadie are symmetrical hooks for her neckwear, built from glued-together LEGO pieces. How these are arranged is up to me, but I tend to enjoy putting the long pieces (nooses and beads) on one hook, and the two chokers on the other. 

On the deep half of the box, the clothes are hanging, and the accessory box with storage for the knives, shoes, handkerchief/scarf, gloves, and garter sits on the floor on the left side so the new skirt of the Spotlight dress has room. On the right, a ribbon tie matching the waist tie is included to hold the pole of the doll stand.

I built a mount for the (Miss Astronaut Barbie 2025) stand base to hang on the back wall, behind the clothes on the rack. 

I constructed a LEGO assembly with a whip accessory, used to thread through the hole of the base, and a second clip on the assembly holds the end of the whip and closes the loop. The mount attaches to a glued tile on the back of the box, but the whole mount is not glued to the tile so the mount can be removed to thread on and remove the base much easier. 

I wasn't sure what to do with the stand clip, but I was inspired by the O.M.G. stands having molded attachments for the clips on the hollow underside of the bases. I found a button that the clip could encircle snugly and glued it into the hollow base, and repainted and varnished over the button for appearances' sake. I didn't bother to sand off the Barbie logo on the base.

Here's the non-doll stock all laid out, minus the unofficial replacement earrings which I keep in Sadie's head because they're very easy to lose.

Here's the neckwear--two nooses (one realistic, one fashionable), two chokers (one black, one white), and the Spotlight beads.

And the shoes--the Barbie heels, Masker Masquerade black boots, black Disney slippers, and white Mego boots. I could have added some #SnapStar boots from a doll I got, but they weren't necessary and weren't quite Sadie's style.

Here's the Spotlight dress with the specially-shaped hanger I designed.

Here's the underwear set with their special hanger.

The After Five dress has an extra-wide hanger because its neckline is so wide.

The pink robe and the Mego shirt could also use wider hangers than I gave them, but they're okay with the ones they have-standard shape, also made by me.

Now to show the looks...and rename them. After Five, on Sadie, will be called "666 PM".

I like this look with the heels, gloves, and black choker, and this will be my default display for this doll.

This look includes the garter and the kitchen knife under the skirt.

She can wear one of the nooses instead of her necklace. I took her outside to a tree like she cut herself down with her knife. Can you tell The Haunted Mansion has plagued my thoughts of late?

666 PM can be rearranged with the nets and black boots to more closely match the real FV design, as I've shown. The garter is not in play with the nets because that's not as easy to dress and doesn't look as good.

I can also take the gloves and choker off and give her the slippers to more closely match the Series 1 Sadie look.

S1 Sadie is screaming and begging for a reroot and she deserves it. When I have the time, it's guaranteed.

I could also throw in some white socks for the simple 666 PM look, but those don't come up in any other looks and I don't have any Barbie-sized Mary Janes that would complement the socks best, so she can just get by with the slippers.

My modified Solo in the Spotlight look is going to be called "Murder in the Moonlight" on Sadie.

I kind of like the bloody Bowie knife more for this look. This costume can't strap her knife to her leg. I think she looks good with gloves or without. The shoes she wears are irrelevant since they go unseen.

Here's some portraits.

Putting the Mego shirt over the After Five dress is a bit fiddly, but it can work pretty well. I think it looks best with the white boots and either the white noose or choker, and has a professional connotation, so I call this look "Working Stiff".

Sadie can also go for a heavily black costume with the choker, gloves, shirt, boots, and nets. 

Looks built around the underwear set are, naturally, "Bedtime Sadie".

I didn't make a permanent bed for Sadie, but I modified the other coffin lid I tried repainting for the box and filled it with some sloppy hand-sewn bedding and the mattress I prepped.

Sadie can take on the kinky tones of the canon Fashion Victims line if she pairs the black choker, black boots, nets, and gloves with the lingerie set.

This works well with some of the creepier contortions. Freaky positions and such...

"Have you ever tried...this one?"

Even if Sadie's not going for a kinkier experience, she's not going to give her partners an innocent night of fun. Only one person leaves her bedroom.

I feel that the Spotlight beads finally come into play when Sadie wears the pink robe, like this is her fancy bedtime look--ready for sleep, but with the makeup, hairstyle, and jewels of somebody ready to step out on the town. It doesn't make sense, but it does, right?

Garter and a knife added back in, plus the slippers.

This could be another mode for her to entertain her newest victim--some want her kinky, some want her glamorous or homey (and all die to her), but this could also just be the level she's on privately, never letting her glamor slip, operating like poor Mae West. This could also be how Sadie takes her breakfast.

The beads don't really make sense with any other costume I created for her, but I like them here.

Here's my Barbie Sadie with LDD Minis Sadie, who plays a very believable "younger self" to this custom.

I think LDD fully forgot how integral the retro aesthetic was to the original Sadie doll, and maybe, if Sadie had been lucky enough to make it to FV wave 2, she might have gotten something closer to my custom doll. Making her a modern goth with pleather and arm nets missed out on the midcentury appeal the character otherwise tends to embody in her designs.

Left and center--S1 original Sadie and FV Sadie. Tone and aesthetic were not at all retained.

I can see the justification that if Sadie was a kid in the sixties, she'd be representing a later decade as a grown-up, but the dead don't grow and mature, so FV Sadie would have to be an alternate-universe version of the character anyway, at which point evoking a later decade than the original doll is not logically required.

Here's my personal Fashion Victim next to my altered canon edition.

I didn't improve my FV Sadie. For all her faults in ethos and optics, she truly looked best like she was.

I think the face repainting/blush removal and possibly the bust size reduction from "absurd" to "exaggerated" were okay, but the costume was wrecked. Then again, the hair is wrecked by low quality and this doll probably didn't stand a chance of aging well even without me speeding the destruction. I definitely like my take better.

This was FV's take on a character profile.

My profile would be different:

Years Deceased: Not enough to keep me off the cover of Morgue magazine.

Signature Style: Simple black, with just enough white to show blood. Anybody who knows I also like pink is on my kill list...guess that includes you now, too.

Dream Date: Anybody with a heartbeat to silence.

Likes: Fashion modeling, a romantic black rose, knives, bones, viscera

Dislikes: Sunlight, innocence, cooking, marriage

Best Friends: Sin, Eggzorcist

This particular lens of LDD-to-Barbie transformation makes me wonder what else would be fun this way. This one would work well with the period style of the character design, though retro Barbies don't look this weirdly pale in any accessible releases.

This one would be blindingly obvious thanks to the very very easy premade costume connection. Get a repro swimsuit Barbie and you're set. If LDD were thinking smart, they could have easily done this FV concept as parody in their own style. The After Five hat would work better for this, too!

Styled with a cuter hairdo than the original LDD, of course.

I'd actually love to try pursuing a swimsuit-repro Barbie customized into Faith...it's just that recoloring is such a poor prospect. I think dipping her in a really good gloss varnish could put a final seal on the head after everything else. I tried dipping a severed vinyl doll face in polyurethane once, and didn't see the coating peeling or wrinkling or degrading when bending the material, but I don't want the yellow tint from that varnish. I worry the layers underneath could still be damaged and distorted. I'm not sure watercolor pencil could recolor the head more stably than pastel, because the sealant itself is what appears to lack the flexibility to stay adhered to vinyl after squeezing (at least, without flaws. Since I had such better results with an acrylic-only faceup for Sadie, though, perhaps I could do the same for Faith, using polyurethane-tier gloss varnish as the only and final sealant. Faith's gloss gimmick may have handed me the solution to sealing a recolored doll. Maybe. It would be a leap of faith and an experiment. Worth trying, but perhaps not to expect success from. I can also repeat the stress test on a repainted vinyl head to really screen for flaws in the concept. 

The only 1959-sculpt Barbie to be officially cast in green is a Wicked Witch of the West, who I could never sacrifice for a custom if I got her.

Love her.

The Mark Ryden bumblebee Barbie doll actually has the ideal base casting color for several spooky characters, but it's by no means an easy or expendable base for customization, given it's a rare expensive collector doll.

Not sure which body sculpt she has--those aren't the 1959 hands.

I like all of Ryden's Barbie work, but the black-and-white dolls are more like fashion models than surreal characters, and the pink doll looks incredible but is caked with gel for her absurd retro hairdo which is at least half of her appeal. The bee would be(e) my most likely choice of his work. She has a grey flocked buzz cut (haha!) under her hood.

LDDs who are painted with lowered lids, like Greed, Elisa, Madame La Mort, and Ella von Terra would also adapt well to the 1959 Barbie sculpt, but the real game with this is, if you're not making your own doll clothes, finding an existing and compatible Barbie wardrobe that matches the original LDD enough to be considered a design adaptation! Faith and Sadie (and almost certainly Dottie Rose) all have options. 

Many of LDD's cast are already designed as adults, so making a Barbie of them might feel more locked into recreating the original doll on the different base as closely as possible, but with the child characters, translating the design has looser guides because you're already imagining them grown up with a derivation of the original template. The eight official Fashion Victims feature reimaginings of both adult and child characters, so maybe I could open my mind more if I adapt any other LDDs this way. Maybe Dottie Rose could have white hair and a pink dress and a different hair silhouette!

Sin is out of luck for twinning Sadie, as the After Five dress doesn't come in red...but perhaps, if I were willing to ditch the twin gimmick, a copy of the repro Silken Flame doll would make a beautiful base for a Sin--just repaint and add horns and a tail. (Silken Flame is the dress and belt and shoe set, but the repro doll of the same name also incorporates the Red Flare set's coat, hat, and gloves.) The hair could stay since the doll comes in a raven variant, and plugging horn pieces into the doll scalp would work well.

I love this doll too, and I'd actually be 100% comfortable keeping her as-is. (Not my photo.)

Turning her into Sin would be an option, though, and far less demanding than my Sadie project! Doing the lip liner scares me, though.

The Busy Gal set could be a second outfit choice for a Barbie Sin. I don't think I could be bothered to repeat the customization process with the box and full wardrobe, though.

I'd also be interested in a boy LDD fashion doll done with an OG Ken base...though I worry I'd have fewer ideas or feel less charmed by the look, since 1960s men's fashion isn't particularly known for being interesting...nor is LDD Damien, in my book.

Is this anything? I'm kind of boring myself here. Damien is so school-themed, but how do I maintain that? Make him look like a teacher? But that's just like any working-man design. Maybe a college-graduation look, but that's so limiting. There is a sixties Ken grad set, though!

Sadie doesn't really have a designated "Ken", anyway. She and Damien are visually quite similar, but they aren't indicated to have any particular synergy as a duo. Damien also doesn't complete the right "Adam and Eve, Barbie and Ken" phrasal cadence when paired with Sadie's name. There are actually zero monosyllabic LDD boys who are right for the role. Sadie doesn't have the right male Eve to her female Adam! I guess you could call Lou Sapphire "Lou" for short, but that's not the only name he has, since his name makes no sense without the first and last forming a pun. The Toy Soldier is named Jake, but he has no synergy with Sadie and isn't billed by his proper name. 

Maybe there just is no Ken in Sadie's book...after all, she has a deliberate duo match in Sin, who isn't a boy. And wouldn't you know, "Sadie and Sin" has that classic phrasal cadence...maybe their connection is that they're future girlfriends! 

For all I was able to find intrigue and some appeal in FV Sadie, I had leagues more fun with my customized Sadie Barbie doll. She's the answer to the FV concept that LDD never found--and granted, maybe wouldn't be allowed to reach. 

I do think this was the way LDD could have had a mature, cheeky fashion doll design that followed the same aesthetic thread as the original dolls and didn't get...porno with it. I love classic Barbie, and marrying her with LDD in this way gave me a beautiful killer to cherish. To be sure, at least 50 percent of the appeal of the doll has to come from the overwhelming X-factor of midcentury Barbie design. There's something so striking about the old doll style, and the doll being authentic to the period LDD was referencing with the original Series 1 LDDs is icing on the cake.  Mezco wouldn't have been able to make their Fashion Victims look nearly like this since the face is so distinctive and copyrighted (after Barbie infringed with it first...), but if BEGoth was able to make its dolls on a Barbie body ripoff for a few years, and if LDD was able to mimic Kelly doll bodies so closely, surely they could have ridden on a Barbie-like doll design.

This custom project was also a nightmare and I had to cut losses at several points to just be finished with it. This is another "love you, but thank god I don't have to think about you anymore" kind of project. Customizing sometimes hooks me so badly I can't not do it, and then when I do, I wonder why I ever try. Again, that's not every experience, but this was one of those that made me feel irrational for continuing sometimes. I'm quite happy to put this one aside and call it complete. 

I still feel like I have no idea what LDD has in its plan for the future. That will be short-lived, because once it's clear what style and release model Series 36 (!!!) is using, then I'll have some sense of "okay, now this is modern LDD". But it's fun to keep looking back at what was, and I'll continue to do so. I've been selling some LDDs for the first time this year, and there are numerous LDD projects I've had in mind that simply got pushed aside for other things this year, so there's still much to do. Maybe next year will click back in to 2024 levels? Not sure. Having to keep tabs on new releases again is definitely going to keep me on the line to some degree.

Even if I don't like the LDD we get going forward, I'll always love classic Sadie. That's really what this project is about.