As some of you may know, I used to collect designer vinyl toys. These are “toys” (often fairly static) for display purposes, aimed primarily at adults and designed by all manner of street artists from around the world. And it looks like “the itch” is back in a big way.
My collection so far is already fairly large with several pretty rare items making it a pretty pricey one as well. And it was the costs associated with getting my hands on the latest toys by my favourite designers that made me sort of give it up in the first place. At the time I was seeing this girl who, whilst always claiming “it’s your money, so it’s your choice,” tended to make me justify my purchases to her (especially the bigger ones). After a while this made collecting new toys such a hassle that I eventually just gave up and started pursuing other hobbies.
But said collection had already formed and as I was still pretty damn proud of it all I ended up making the smallest room in my house into a sort of hermetically sealed (for sunlight and smoke anyway) display room. In reality, all this meant was that my pride and joy was consigned to being stored in a room that nobody ever visited. That is, until I showed them to my girlfriend the other day.
At that point she was already vaguely aware of me having collected them in the past, as well as having seen them around town (as some “hipper” clothing stores tend to sell them). But she really surprised me by saying that she not only liked my collection, she even wanted some of her own! As you might imagine, going from having someone to whom I have to justify everything to having someone who is pretty much pushing me to buy even more takes a bit of getting used to.
So not only am I planning to buy some new additions to my collection over the next few weeks, I also want to start moving my existing collection downstairs and into regular view. This does mean that I’ll have to “hack” my iKEA Expedit cupboards by giving them see-through cabinet doors or something (whatever is both fairly cheap and keeps out the large amount of cigarette smoke drifting around my living room), but I’ll end up with a much nicer-looking “main” room with everything on display.
Anyway, what are those new additions I hear you ask? Well, I’ve always loved Joe Ledbetter’s work to death, so I intend to keep trying to complete my collection of his toys. But there are also several unrelated toys and mini-series (most larger individual toys are about 8″ tall, mini-series are generally about 2.5-3″ tall and often come in randomized blind boxes) that I have my eye on at the moment. For convenience (and to keep track myself) I’ve made a little linked list of the first few things that came to mind while perusing Artoyz (my main European store for toys now that all reliable Dutch sources seem to have vanished).
- Sweety – US Version
- The Simpsons – Matt Groening
- Humphrey Mooncalf – Regular
- The Simpsons – Series 2
- Family Guy – Mini Series
- Swatch X Kidrobot – Bengali by Joe Ledbetter
- Bossy Bear 12″
There’s plenty of other stuff I want, but if I spend any amount of time on a designer toy website I always end up just wanting to buy everything. It should give you all a reasonable indication of what kind of toys I like to collect and I promise to include some photographs of my collection once I get around to cataloguing what I’ve collected so far (which should be soon). Hope to see you all next time!