The duo design each of their collections based on different themes, with past collections including ‘Swan Lake’ and ‘Royals’. Occasionally they will also collaborate with other creatives to create one-off custom dolls. Over the years, the sisters have acquired a kind of cult status, due to the fantastical nature of their creations. “The dolls allow people to plunge into the world of fairytales,” they explain, “we create complete characters, not just the doll itself but the image as a whole, starting with the wig and the make-up and ending with the costume. It all works as a single organism.”

The sisters made their first doll in 2004 while on a course in clothes design. “We found ourselves in a doll exhibition and we got so carried away that we took a masterclass and started trying to make dolls. Since then we just haven’t stopped.” Because each element is produced by hand, the process calls for the sisters to inhabit various roles all at once – as well as artists, they are skilled mouldmakers, costume designers, hairstylists and photographers.

Combining historical and contemporary references (the face of the doll is partially based on the model Devon Aoki) adds to the beguiling nature of the dolls, making them difficult to define. Created with such extraordinary attention to detail that they appear hyperreal, each doll is treated as a unique character with their own markings and traits, such as pierced ears, tattoos, and even individual moles and freckles.
The sisters explain that the extreme, angular frame of the dolls is based on fashion sketches, and serves to enhance the final silhouette. “They are not natural, it is by no means a real body,” they explain, “we’ve extended their proportions and elongated the neck. Due to the way the fabric falls, when you dress a doll with more natural proportions, the body of the doll looks bulky and the neck looks too short.”

Cast using polyurethane resin and porcelain, each doll measures around 40cm tall. While early incarnations were static, in 2012 the sisters developed their line of posable, ball-jointed dolls. This adds to their uncanny, lifelike feel, while the ability for provocative poses also adds a fetishistic dimension. For the sisters, the progression to posable dolls marked a big victory, with their frustration at the limitations of static limbs tracing all the way back to their childhood. “When we got our first doll, a standard Barbie doll, we were disappointed. We wanted her body to be more alive, we even tried to alter it with playdough,” they explain.

Due to the painstaking detail that goes into creating every doll by hand, each collection is very limited edition, the exclusivity of which only fuels their status as luxury art objects. For the sisters, the reason for the small numbers (they never do more than 15 of each) is down to a refusal to compromise on quality. Asked about the timeframe of production, the sisters shrug that it simply takes as long as it takes. Each doll is completed in its own time, before being finished off with their distinctive signature, a hand-painted moth.

What is the process for creating the hairstyles? When we first started to produce dolls, we got acquainted with materials specifically used for producing wigs for dolls. These materials allowed us to make things more delicate and realistic. Our dolls have hair made from llama, goat or alpaca wool, which is very thin, flexible and easy to dye, so our wigs look really realistic. It all depends on what kind of look we’re trying to achieve, we choose the hair type depending on what kind of texture we need. We also use Japanese silk in our wigs as it adds a specific hardness so that it can take on different forms.

Your references for the characters of the dolls is very varied, combining fictional, historical and contemporary influences. Do you also include current fashion trends? We don’t really follow fashion trends, mainly because we don’t have the time. We work in a very relaxed way, because we don’t feel the need to follow trends. Our collaborations happen very organically. For example, when we collaborated with Die Antwoord, it was because Ninja reposted an image of our dolls on Instagram. We thanked him and somehow the conversation continued and he said it would be cool if we could make a doll of Yolandi. We said yes because she suits our philosophy, she has this extraordinary, underground image which is interesting to us. We built on her image, interpreting and stylising it. We made different variations of wigs, with pale white hair.