Review: Lea Clark’s Rainforest Hike Outfit

Hello! Today, I’m going to be reviewing an outfit from the collection of Lea Clark, American Girl’s newest GOTY doll: the Rainforest Hike Outfit.

The outfit comes with a T-shirt, cargo pants, hiking boots, a belt, a watch, and a headband. It’s priced at $34.

The white T-shirt has a beautiful butterfly design on it, described by American Girl as a “watercolor butterfly.” The shirt velcros in the back.

Lea’s cropped cargo pants are a grayish-green color. There are parallel lines in the fabric, but you don’t really notice them until you look closer.

There are two nicely sized pockets.

The pocket flaps lift, and there’s enough space to put something small into the pockets.

Functional belt loops go the whole way around the pants.

The striped green belt is not attached to the pants. It closes with a large plastic belt buckle.

The belt is surprisingly long.

A complaint is that little hands might have trouble feeding the belt through the loops. Also, I’ve found it hard to style the belt. The shirt covers it, and the buckle bulges in an unattractive way. Here, let me show you:

With belt.

 Without belt.

The outfit in the second image is more pleasing, because the belt isn’t making a lump beneath the shirt. I’ll most likely use the Rainforest Hike Outfit without the belt.

Of course, I could hike (pun intended XD) the shirt up above the belt so that it can be seen, or tuck the shirt into the pants, but I like it better without the belt at all.

Moving on to Lea’s shoes! They are made of a tough, leathery fabric, with thick plastic soles. The hiking boots have beige, pink, and green fabric on them.

Side view.

The boots lace up with a green stretchy rope. In order to put them on, you don’t have to loosen strings or undo velcro or anything like that; the fabric is simply flexible enough to let the doll’s foot slip right in.

Next up, Lea’s watch! It’s made out of hot pink plastic. Clear plastic protects the watch face. There are bumps on the sides of the watch that are supposed to be buttons.

A better look at the watch face.

The watch goes on like the real thing: you have to stick the lime green clasp through one of the holes in the flexible watch strap.

You can even slip the end of the strap through a hard plastic thing that slides back and forth (such great description on my part! *eye roll* But seriously, does anyone know what this thing is called?)!

The Rainforest Hike Outfit also includes a yellow headband. It’s about a centimeter wide, and made of elastic.

 

There’s a bow on the headband, but I prefer to style it so that the bow is in the back.

Overall, I absolutely love the Rainforest Hike Outfit. It looks amazing on Lea Clark, and I bet it would look great on other American Girl dolls as well.

It’s got a lot of mix-n-match potential! I can see the T-shirt and the cargo pants going with lots of different outfits.

-Loren