If you, as a parent, are convinced that your girl’s favorite activity is placing different clothes or shoes on dolls, you may be a bit off, but not by much. The love that kids have for these kinds of activities has never ceased, and girls dress up games have become more and more complex and interesting over time. However, what has changed now is that most kids prefer to do it on the Internet. This is because fashion dress up online offers more possibilities than real-life dress up ever did before, and kids can simply explore endlessly.



However, what very few people know is that long before fashion dress up activities were available online, thousands of years before actually, a similar type of game was the precursor of this one. Girls dress up games originally come from a game that used to be played with paper dolls, as far back as paper existed (some of us even used to play this game no more than ten, twenty years ago, in kindergarten, before the Internet was so widespread, as a quick alternative to real dolls and dolls’ clothes). The oldest paper dolls used for such purposes are traced back as far as 900 A.D., although some were tri-dimensional, unlike the ones we are used to. In addition, some of them were used for rituals instead of play.

Then, in the early nineties, game creators began making games where users could drag and drop several clothing items, accessories and hairstyles into a digital image of a doll. They soon became known, as fashion dress up gained immense popularity, worldwide, a popularity that lasted to this day and which doesn’t seem to fade away one single bit. Quite on the contrary, girls dress up games only continue to improve and become more complex as time passes, only to become more attractive.

The appeal of girls dress up games online to such vast audiences and such wide age groups is mainly due to the friendly interface. The digital images of dolls are usually created to look like cartoon characters, and this appeals greatly to children and adults alike. However, this was just the initial stereotype. Some fashion dress up games have cartoon characters, some images of girls for a more realistic feel, some include images of celebrities while some include no image at all, but are simply useful to see how different items go together.