She had a she-devil, voodoo, wicked catwoman from Mars make-up scheme consisting of black under and over eyeliner extending into frighteningly sinister points, her irises were “Plan Nine from Outer Space”-white and vacant, even though her side glance insinuated, “What did you dare say?” or “Speak only when spoken to.” Her lips, in the shape that comes when you say “bitch” very clearly, were a fresh blood red as were the flaring nostrils. The shape of lips were also the acme of a 1940s pin up girl. Her eyebrows obviously were accustomed to plucking and arching. They made her very pissed-off looking, in any case. She wore a lot of rouge on top of it all.

Her skin was hard, shiny painted plastic and very pale (perhaps from being too often in nightclubs and, like vampires, not receiving enough exposure to the sun). The teenage-style Aryan-perfect ponytail was the only concession to her supposed age group, and even this hair style came tied in a bow made of thin shiny cord which looked as if it could transform into a whip or tie ankles together (or tie another doll’s arms behind its back).

Lilli’s wardobe further accentuated her “Betty Page” (famous pin-up and bondage queen of the ‘50s) aura. Her outfits, besides being tight as cited earlier, they were low-cut, very short, revealing, and unlined. One overly enthusiastic German collector implied that her abnormally short skirts pre-dated and fore-saw the miniskirt of the mid-sixties....which is not at all the reality. These short dresses were typically forties pin-up clothes inspired by genuine Betty Page-ish fetish clothes seen in underground fetish magazines of the era. There was the leading smut mag BIZARRE and the by-then famous Vargas and his Vargas Girls and also the bawdy “stag” films such as Irving Klaw’s TEASE-A-RAMA, STRIP-A-RAMA and the hilarious VARIETEASE featuring, as usual, the omnipresent burlesque queen herself Betty Page. Also featured was the nearly surreal and certainly very bust-y red-headed Tempest Storm, and the demi-mondaine blonde Lilli St. Cyr (who had the absurd pretentions of being an “artiste” and sponsored a line of brassieres, commonly better known as “bras”, of the era), as well as a number of other strippers of underground fame of the epoch, including a skinny wispy blonde transvestite who had suspiciously imitative make-up to Bild Lilli doll. One wonders if the German Bild Lilli doll was infact named for Lilli Marlene, muse to German soldiers or the internationally famous stripper Lilli St. Cyr...a question to ponder!

Nonetheless, these short dresses had a point to make. The whole joke was that these garments were exactly like school girl-ish fashionable clothes but VERY VERY short to show garter belts and stockings and to deliberately seem naughty. Anyhow,Lilli’s first clothes were perverse and intentionally so. The dancing dress (for those nightly appearances in Hamburg bars) had a corsage hastily pinned to the bosom. The dirndl outfit, in typically Bavarian print on print, was low cut and rather perverse-looking on the doll (“You vant zum cream pie?”). It was the German version of Irving Klaw/Betty Page’s wicked and funny version of a “French” maid, who teetered around with strapless black satin short, short, short skirted dresses, fluffy apron and chunky ultra-stilletto pumps with black nylon hosiery....with garters flagrantly exposed.

There were a number of extremely short dance and skating skirts revealing her unusually high-cut shorts. The cuffed shorts and capris came with short-sleeved blouses that tied à la Caribbean calypso limbo dancer, the sleaziest dance of the times...rivaled perhaps only with stripping on black and white film to bump and grind music. Sheath gowns, (à la Tempest Storm) well, they were cut down to there and up to there (and remained unlined and strapless). She was a tough cookie, Lilli was, and I would not want to be the doll that “messed” with her.

Lilli was sold wearing many different outfits at the beginning which were virtually on the border of risqué tipping a bit into all-out sleaze. The catalogue, still geared to young German males, claimed she had outfits to be “the star of every bar”...an unquestionable allusion to prostitution but eventually, when she was marketed as a plaything for little girls, Lilli acquired slightly more covered up ballgowns, not very revealing ski outfits, semi-fitted and somehow stodgy stewardess and nurse costumes(well, that had fetish appeal, of course) and a lot of fitted, mondaine ensembles, high necked blouses, white fake fur wraps, fake ocelot coats (very Liz Taylor in the sixties film classic “Butterfield Eight”, a heart-wrenching tale about a mis-understood and of course, doomed fashion model/whore) and classically Bizarre magazine-ish fetishist-style satin-lined black velvet suits.