The Doll's Closet - Cher Scholar

Mego Corp. circa 1977: the toy catalogues were all aglut with Cher Stuff: your run-of-the mill little Bob Mackie creations, the Designer Collection and the even swankier Boutique Collection gave you plenty to fill your little Cher Dressing Room with many little pink hangers of many little Cher dollfits. Some handy folks even put together some groovy fits of their own. Good times!

Cher doll outfits were designed either from Bob Mackie originals or by Bob Mackie himself. They recreated some of Cher’s iconic outfits from her TV variety shows.

The Dolls

Read an overview about Cher dolls.

Bob Mackie

Not only did he design the iconic adult outfits, but Bob Mackie designed all these little guys too. And although he made quite a splash designing for Barbie later in his career (and also doing another Cher doll line of 4 separate dolls), before that he designed all the outfits for the Mego Sonny and Cher dolls, which amounts to about 58 outfits at my latest counting.

There were six categories of Cher doll outfits
Click to enlarge.

Outfits Sold on the Dolls
- Orange or Reddish/Orange Box: Default Sonny outfit: jeans and a sweater
  (with the back cover illustrating other outfits)
- Orange Box: Default Cher dress: pink mermaid gown
  (with the back cover illustrating other outfits)
  There was no Vamp outfit, strangely. Maybe this outfit was meant to approximate the Vamp.
- Dark Pink Box: Default Growing Hair Cher gown: black gown with silver stripes
  (back cover illustrating how to work the doll)
- Red Box: Default discount Cher dolls in swimsuits: yellow or red
  (also came in plastic bags)
  
  Red swimsuit Cher
  
  Yellow swimsuit Cher
  
  Back of the Discount Box
Blue box outfits (the cheapest outfits that came on flat blue cardstock, released in 1976)
Green box outfits (released in 1976)
Purple box outfits (released in 1976)
Black box outfits, the Boutique Collection (the most elaborate of the outfits, released in 1977)
White box outfits, sold in the Montgomery Ward catalog (released in 1976 and 1977)

The questions are many. Why were the dresses broken out into blue, green and purple? Why were the green and purple box dresses both called “Designer Collection” outfits and why were they released in the same year? Were all the collections on sale at the same time (except for the later Boutique Collection)? If anybody knows more about the history of each series, when they came out, what the differences were between the Green and Purple series, please reach out to me. Not even the great Wizard of A.I. seems to know.

A great resources on the outfits is the book Cher Doll & Her Celebrity Friends by Sandra “Johnsie” Bryan. She is a longtime collector with images of most of the outfits and information on the release dates and original prices.

The Brochure

The big blue fold-out brochure was like an Aztec codex. It listed the Designer Collection outfits (the Green and Purple series, but not even all of those). It doesn’t list the Blue box outfits (like Laverne, Cleopatra or Mint Julep, for example), the Black Boutique Collection (like Mother Goose or Liberty Belle, for example) or the Montgomery Ward (White Box) outfits. It does list all of Sonny’s outfits (which came out in the Green series) and the Cher’s Dressing Room toy.

Ads
Click to enlarge.

It seems these ads may have been early prototypes and some of the outfits ended up coming in different colors or with alterations.

Cher’s Dressing Room

You could buy this as a separate toy to organize your Cher doll outfits. The dressing room could also be a separate closet for the Sonny & Cher Theatre in the Round toy, which had an area that looked like a backstage dressing room. Both had makeup tables and mirrors. Maybe we can conceptualize the big dressing room as more the closet at The Big House.

According to Sandra Bryan in Cher Doll & Her Celebrity Friends a black stretch unitard outfit came with Cher’s Dressing Room.

: Dressing Room outer box

: Dressing Room folded up into a box

The Sonny & Cher Theater in the Round back box summary of features

Inside Cher’s Dressing Room with a makeup table and mirror, a closet for a few outfits, a couch below some fancy Indian Nation art, and that card thing which I never figured out. Was this supposed to be a full-length mirror?

Cher’s dressing room at CBS (ostensibly). Check out those pictures of herself on the wall. This looks more like Ted Baxter’s dressing room than Cher’s. This version of the dressing room is cluttered with the upright piano’s bench and the microphone stand base for some reason. There’s also the hair dryer sticker stuck to the wall behind the red chair. Judging by the state of that closet off to the right, I’m not surprised at this chaos.

Travel Trunk

There was also a Travel Trunk to port all the outfits to other exotic locations (like your basement or your brother’s room) and stickers to note all the fancy locales the doll and her outfits (or Cher maybe) have traveled.

Recycling Cher Into Farrah

Once the Cher craze burned down a bit in the late 1970s, Mego did a kind of loser move by reframing Cher toys as Farrah toys. Lame for Cher and lame for Farrah.

According to Cher Doll & Her Celebrity Friends by Sandra Bryan, the surplus Cher fashions were eventually sold by Mego and repacked by ToysRUs, Jordache and TV Stars Fashion Collection brands. The Suzanne Sommers’ doll was also sold in Cher’s pink mermaid dress and Cher’s show logo was found on Sommers’ doll stand.