When, earlier this week, Mattel unveiled its 40th-anniversary “Modern Era” American Girl dolls, the response online was not muted. Kirsten Larson, the Swedish immigrant of 1854 prairie lore, had traded her earnest braids for space buns. Felicity Merriman of 1774 colonial Virginia was suddenly in jeans. Addy Walker—whose story begins in enslavement in 1864—was styled with gold hoops. And Samantha Parkington—the orphan navigating 1904 New York in puffed sleeves and hair ribbons—appeared to be fashioned in Ralph Lauren kids. Plus, the dolls themselves had been scaled down from their original 18-inch cloth-bodied forms to 14.5-inch figures, their features subtly sharpened with glossier lips and darker lashes. Ozempic jokes proliferated. Loyalists were aghast. Why, many wondered, did something so sacred—so freighted with childhood memory—require a makeover in the first place?
Mattel, for its part, was admirably frank. Jamie Cygielman, the company’s global head of dolls, told the New York Times that while adult consumers remain invested in the historical characters, younger consumers gravitate toward contemporary collections. The new line, she explained, is “meant to celebrate the original historical characters in a different form.” Translation: the nine-year-olds were not clamoring for more 1904.
And why would they be? Yes, we’re in a kind of boom time for nostalgia, but if you consider the dates and details, rarely does it travel beyond the late 20th or early 21st centuries. Scroll through TikTok and you’ll find Y2K revivalism in abundance—Juicy Couture tracksuits, low-rise denim, the glossy bravado of McBling. We get the occasional ’90s revival thanks to CBK and the like. But that’s about as far back as the collective mood board stretches. The Gossip Girl books are getting a sequel. We’re remaking The Devil Wears Prada. The musical-film revival of Mean Girls generated far more online chatter than Steven Spielberg’s triumphant remake of West Side Story. The message is quiet but consistent: the past is welcome, so long as it doesn’t go too far.
I never actually had an American Girl doll. When I was of doll-coveting age, I wasn’t living in the United States, and by the time I arrived, I had technically outgrown them. It wasn’t until adulthood—walking past the American Girl flagship on Fifth Avenue on my way to work—that they began to exert their pull. I’d pass the windows and see little girls in matching outfits with their dolls, headed upstairs for afternoon tea, and something in me would flicker. A distinctly feminine strain of Peter Pan syndrome surfaced—not because I longed to be a child again, but because I had never sipped Earl Grey beside a doll of my own. (And if I had, she’d be a Samantha, for sure.)
There’s no question that I would have been an American Girl gal. In childhood I had a set of historical paper dolls whose Empire waists, crinolines, and flapper frocks ignited my curiosity about history as no textbook ever could. In many ways, I suspect they helped to shape the career I eventually built. It’s why now, buying an American Girl doll for my daughter feels to me less like an indulgence (though she’s only a few months old) than a kind of reclamation. More than anything, I want her to feel that same tug toward another time.
That was the quiet genius of the original American Girl dolls. They were not merely charming collectibles; they were portals. Samantha’s tea-length dresses were narrative entry points into child labor reform, murmurs of suffrage, coal furnaces, and a city lit by gas lamps. The books were unflinching in ways that now feel almost radical; they assumed nine-year-olds could contend with grief, injustice, and social change. To play with those dolls was to understand that girlhood has looked radically different across centuries.
In their 40th-anniversary iteration, the dolls offer something else: familiarity. But girls today get 2026 stories every day of their lives. What’s the fun in another mirror? Even though my daughter is years away from choosing a doll for herself, if she were doing so tomorrow I would gently steer her toward the originals. We cannot expect Mattel to make the 19th-century trend. But I can insist that puffed sleeves matter, that gas lamps matter, that the unfamiliarity of another era is precisely the point.
