More Than Toys: Building Community One American Girl Doll at a Time

The moment you step into Kyla Suzeanne’s doll room, more than 140 glossy plastic eyes greet you from pristine white shelves mounted on white walls: a testament to years of dedicated collecting that began with a childhood Christmas gift and evolved into Facebook Marketplace thrift hunts and trips to the American Girl Place, the company’s store. 

The room is more than just a display; it’s a living time capsule of Kyla’s 28-year journey as a collector. From the very first doll that sparked her passion to those she’s customized herself by softening heads in boiling water to swap eyes and switch wigs, the collection tells countless stories.

Like a high school cafeteria divided into cliques, the pink-wearers, the fashionistas in their chic outfits, and the historical dolls all proudly don their period attire. Each doll’s individual identity and style shines. These cherished figures captivate the almost 5,000 subscribers of Kyla’s YouTube channel, Kyla Collects, uniting a close-knit, passionate community of adult American Girl doll enthusiasts.

Seeing beyond the surface

Suzeanne received her first American Girl doll, Kit Kittredge from the Great Depression era, for Christmas when she was three. “I looked just like her,” she recalled. Like many millennial women who once eagerly unwrapped American Girl dolls for Christmas or birthdays, she put her dolls away as she approached her teen years, thinking she was “too cool for them.”

Suzeanne originally created her YouTube channel in 2020 to raise awareness about Septo-Optic Dysplasia and Optic Nerve Hypoplasia with Nystagmus, a rare congenital disorder she was born with that can affect vision. “If a person with 20/20 vision was looking at the world through my eyes, it would be blurry to them,” she said. “I have to use my phone to zoom into stuff all the time, and unfortunately, I’ll never be able to drive.”

When her first videos didn’t gain much traction, she knew she had to pivot and change the focus of her content.

In 2020, a thought popped into 23-year old Suzeanne’s head. What is up with American Girl dolls these days? After looking up the brand on YouTube, she was shocked to find countless channels run by adults showing off their doll collections. That Christmas Eve, she clicked “order” and received the doll of the year, Blaire Wilson.

“Within the span of a week, I had three dolls delivered to my house,” she admitted, hooked once again.

For the next year, she posted about her dolls on her YouTube channel every single day. “You have to be okay with starting small and gradually becoming bigger,” she said. “As cliché as it sounds, you have to be yourself. I never thought I would have as many subscribers as I do now.”

She has over 1,000 followers keeping up with her dolls on Instagram and nearly 5,000 on YouTube. Her channel features doll room cleanups, unboxings, and seasonal or themed wardrobe reveals.

Screenshot of Kyla Suzeanne’s YouTube channel (photo credit: Kyla Suzeanne)

Any judgment from others about being an adult doll collector hasn’t been much of a concern for Suzeanne. “Considering I have my visual impairment, I’m already super unique,” she said. “So anything else that I say or do is not a shock to anybody. I’m a doll collector. If you think it’s weird, sorry, but I’m not shy about it.”

Five years later, she owns more than 70 dolls. A room on the main floor of her house, originally meant to be a home office, has become the doll room. American Girl dolls stand about 18 inches tall and 8 inches wide. She’s gonna need a bigger room, to paraphrase Martin Brody, a character from the classic film Jaws.

D-I-Y: making a doll just for you

Her collection includes a specific facet of American Girl doll collecting: customized dolls. Some of the dolls grow up with her, swapping their button-up cardigans and Mary Jane shoes for Taylor Swift Eras Tour merch, purchased from online websites featuring  doll clothing designers making custom American Girl doll fashion accessories. 

Suzeanne even removed wigs from her ten custom dolls, heated their heads in boiling water to pop out their eyeballs, and swapped sets of green eyes for blue ones: the brightest and easiest for her to see.

“As crazy as it sounds, because I’m legally blind,” she said, “it’s all about how the doll looks.”

She remembers proudly sharing the result of her first customization efforts online after struggling to set a new pair of eyes evenly due to her visual impairment, only to have someone comment that the eyes were crooked.

“Good,” she thought. “I finally have a doll that looks like me, as someone who’s never looking people straight in the eyes.”

Kyla Suzeanne and her collection in 2023 (photo credit: Kyla Suzeanne)

These dolls don’t have detailed backstories like the historical collection; she doesn’t touch those because she wants to preserve them exactly as they were intended according to the six-book series that comes with each historical doll. The character-less dolls essentially serve as blank canvases for her, which she can physically mold to give each one a unique personality.

“I like categorizing them into groups,” she explained. “The ones that wear pink, the ones that wear super fancy clothes, and the ones with the piercings and tattoos. I call those ‘the little rebels.’”

Customizing her dolls gave her a feeling of independence. She remembered thinking  she couldn’t make her own doll, but then “I actually did!”

Customization involving piercings, tattoos, and eyeliner is often frowned upon in the doll community. Most members want to preserve the integrity of the dolls as they were originally made by the American Girl brand, or believe that adding makeup or “grown-up clothes” sexualizes them.

“I’m just dressing them a little bit older,” she said. “They’re dolls. Nobody said they had to have a specific age.”

Inclusivity and community matters

The American Girl brand provides specific accessories that help customers customize their dolls to create a relationship with them, almost like a mirror, while striving to be more inclusive. The brand released items such as an allergy-free lunch kit, a service dog set, an asthma and allergy accessories set, hearing aids, and a diabetes accessories kit.

Suzeanne critiques the shallow inclusion efforts of other brands that don’t conduct thorough research to create accessories or toys that genuinely reflect the lifestyles and needs of disabled toy users. “I’ve seen brands do it wrong,” she said. “For example having a non-seeing doll come with a guide dog and a cane, as if those are used together. They’re not.”

For her, American Girl “has been doing it right” by providing accessories separately and prioritizing not just visibility but authenticity. “There’s supposed to be dolls like me out there and there never truly were until these,” she said.

American Girl service dog accessories (photo credit: American Girl website)

Beyond offering a creative outlet that reflects her evolving identity and style, Suzeanne’s collecting and channel forge bonds between collectors through a shared, atypical hobby. The online communities Suzeanne has built through her passion for sharing doll collecting go far beyond the nice comments found under most of her videos: “Your videos always make me smile”, “Love your collection”, “I always love watching your videos, Kyla.”

For some adult collectors, the fact that their hobby revolves around toys originally marketed toward children can make family or friends uncomfortable. One Reddit post shares that nobody knows about their collection except their mother, and that they pack their dolls away and hide them when visitors come over for fear of judgement.

Suzeanne is well aware that many face these struggles “We have to support each other and help those whose families and friends aren’t as supportive,” she said.

Lucky for Suzeanne, her parents and friends encourage her collecting. However, her online community remains essential, since she doesn’t have anyone to talk to about her hobby in person on a daily basis. “It’s exciting to be able to talk to people who care about and understand doll collecting. Some subscribers have told me they’ve become friends because of my channel.”

Suzeanne herself met up with one of her community members at a Taylor Swift Eras Tour concert. The girl snapped a picture of them that night, which she now keeps on her desk at work.

The biggest fan ever

Through the online community of adult American Girl doll collectors, Suzeanne discovered a helpful tool for navigating the American Girl Place in Chicago during a 2019 shopping trip: a tour video by YouTuber and collector Alison, known as BiggestAGFanEVER. Because of her visual impairment, she watched the video several times beforehand to memorize the store’s layout.

Alison is also a key figure in the online doll-collecting community, with nearly 10,000 subscribers. She’s known for her stop-motion videos starring American Girl dolls, especially her long-feature film Trip Through Time, which has earned 64,000 views. She creates everything herself, from writing the scripts and building the sets to voicing the characters, editing the videos, and composing the soundtrack.

Still from BiggestAGFanEVER’s Trip Trough Time YouTube movie (photo credit: BiggestAGFanEVER)

Alison owns around 115 dolls, which she loves to dress and style. “It’s therapeutic,” she says. “Because it brings you back to playing with them as a child. At the same time, it’s a new love, as an adult, where you appreciate the artistic value behind the dolls.”

She and Kyla have connected through their shared passion and become good friends. The community is tight-knit, something Alison deeply values. “I was so scared that I would get made fun of,” she admits. “Some people think adult doll collecting is odd. However, the doll community is probably one of the most supportive and uplifting communities out there.”

It isn’t just millennials showcasing their love for American Girl dolls by revisiting a favorite childhood toy. Recent high school graduate and college-bound Joy Ledwon released an introduction video to her collection in December 2024. During the COVID lockdowns, when there was no one around to photograph, she began photographing her dolls, and in doing so, felt she had transitioned from play to creating something she could be proud of. “They became showpieces,” Ledwon claims.

With her video, she wanted to share a side of herself deeply rooted in who she is, rather than cater to trying to figure out what people want to see. She was surprised and delighted when, the day after releasing her video, classmates approached her to say how cool they thought her channel was.

Building a world

Many doll collector YouTube influencers dress their dolls in custom outfits, often purchased from Etsy or from independent designers like Cipher Crimson. This doll clothing designer is a staple in the American Girl doll customization community, known for her meticulous attention to detail and the cultural relevance of her handmade creations. She began sewing clothes for her dolls at age 12, and by 14, in 2020, she had launched an Etsy shop.

A customize doll from a designer’s website (photo credit: Cipher Crimson)

Her first piece garnered nearly 1,000 likes, but when she released Taylor Swift-inspired doll merch, it became “way bigger and out of my control,” she says. Thousands of people reached out.

“At least the dolls are beautiful,” a lyric from Taylor Swift’s song, “Florida,” which is her Instagram bio. That line clearly stuck with Crimson. After being teased as a teen for loving dolls, she held onto that passion, which has since evolved into a form of craftsmanship that thousands now admire.

Collectors like Kyla Suzeanne are excited to dress their dolls, and themselves, in Crimson’s designs, which reflect their current interests. This could include Taylor Swift’s music or Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie, rather than remaining in the “little girl world” of traditional American Girl aesthetics.

Kyla Suzeanne and her fellow doll collector influencers aren’t simply building American Girl collections in their closets. They’re building a world.

Some people may think dolls are childish. But this? This is art.