Historical Clothes Reviews: Cécile's Special Dress and LE Mini Doll

Joyeux Noël from Cécile Rey!

So as you've noticed, every other day brings you a new holiday review. Because not only do moddies all have holiday outfits left and right, so do the Historicals. This is because all the historicals ended up with some sort of holiday in the winter to have them have something specific for parents to look at and go "That's the holiday dress! Put them in it!" thus making holiday shopping easy as fuck. Kaya got Generic Winter Giving Holiday with her adorned dress, Kirsten initially mixed it up with St. Lucia's Day and a wreath¹ and Rebecca holds down the entire Hanukkah front. Julie got Chinese New Year even though her entire collection focuses on the incredibly awkward holiday tea with her father. Every historical at least skimmed near the winter holidays at some point--or faked it, as the case is with Kaya.

And then along came Cécile Rey and Marie-Grace Gardner, two girls over six books. Because heaven, the Summerlands, and the Gardens forfend they just, you know, give a black girl her own series without her white companion. People might mistake her for Addy or think she's worthy or something. (I really wish Marie-Grace had been left out altogether, or demoted to Best Friend.) Their six book split doesn't even dance near the holidays, what with focusing primarily on the 1853 yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans and the fallout of that as it affected their families and lives. (There is a mention of Christmas in the start of the books, as it is post holiday season--what with their new fashion of the Christmas tree--and then at the end of Book 6.)

While Marie-Grace is boring to me, I adore Cécile. Cécile Rey is a rich black girl in 1850s New Orleans--much better off than Marie-Grace. The fact she is really got some white collector's bloomers twisted because Cécile is black, free, rich, and friends with a white girl. And the way they teach history in this country is so shitty, spotty, and whitewashed that there are generations of people who claim to be educated but believe that black people before 1865 were all slaves and that rich black people are historical anomalies or unrealistic and they certainly would have never been friends with white people lest they be turned into slaves by proxy or something. As Cécile spits at the American idiots in the candy store, she is gens de couleur libres, or a free person of color. Free blacks were not only in New Orleans but everywhere, and have been since the start of the US. Don't go saying stupid shit. She's a goddamn smartass and her first bold act in the books is to basically say "fuck you whitey, don't think you're better than me, I'm free black and if you insult the wrong people in this town we will take your white Américain ass down to the motherfucking ground." Ahem. Go girl.

Still the two girls needed fancy dress. So the two got "special" wear, which can pretty much be considered their holiday wear. Marie-Grace got her Party Outfit, and Cécile got her Special Dress: a set consisting of a red patterned ribbon trimmed dress, white pearl necklace, and matching velvet hair ribbons. Technically she doesn't wear this for the holidays; she wears it when she recites a poem at a benefit for the orphanages in the city in the wake of the yellow fever epidemic. But AG pimps it as holiday wear and holiday wear it is.

As soon as I saw Cécile I declared that she must be mine a la Igor from Dork Tower. I originally had planned to pick her up day of but then they tossed in a preorder bonus of a small set of paper dolls, and I decided that was better than having to go pick her up after work on a Tuesday. Tuesday, when I was working, was my Monday and thus my most bitchy of days and I didn't want to have to cuss a motherfucker out. Cécile got here about a week after official release; I preordered her, every outfit available for her at the time other than the Masked Ball wear,² and then went to AG Seattle and traded in the single book for the six book series and got to reading and all that. The Special Dress cost $28, and still costs that much except for sales. For some reason it is currently not available off the site at the time of this writing, but I suspect that it will go back into stock and not just be abruptly retired out of nowhere. Shit, it better not be. On eBay it appears to be going for less than that, likely because of all the sales MG and Cécile have been having on their collection. I'm sure it might stay there on eBay, barring this temporary sell out being a total retirement whereupon the prices will jack the entire fuck up. 

The double proof that this is her holiday wear is that it's what her LE mini doll is wearing when it was released--though, since there was no holiday book, her mini book is an abridged copy of Meet Cécile. There was a mini book with every LE, and yes I have them, and no, I'll discuss that when I discuss Mini dolls and not a blog post before.