Musée de la Poupée

The Musée de la Poupée in undoubtedly one of the most eerie and unusual museums in Paris. Hidden in a quiet alley in the very crowded Marais district, the actual institution, a genuine pocket museum, looks like a dollhouse itself.

The Doll Museum was opened in 1994 by Guido Odin and his son Samy, who were both deliriously obsessed by the elegant fragility of the subjects in their collection. The Doll Museum displays thousands of artifacts; toys, automatons, miniature mannequins, divination dolls and witchcraft figurines - an army of strange beauty that unveils mankind‘s universal fascination for self representation.

Made out of celluloid, wax, porcelain and even human hair, their bodies and their shapes defined an ideal of feminity that fluctuated through the canon of beauty of their era. Sometimes showcased in dioramas that mimic hausmanian cabinets, tea parties or kitchy seashores, the dolls reenact the illusion of life in the most bizarre of ways, stuck in timeless girly stereotypes. With their cracked smiles and melancholic squints, the myriad of staring glass eyes will offer you a journey through time, a one way ticket into the realm of the uncanny.