For Beauregard Houston Montgomery, a New York partygoer and wit-at-large in the style of Quentin Crisp, collecting Barbie isn't about closed universes or looking inward. It is about looking outward and upward to the heavens. Amassing the dolls, he said quite seriously, is a "way of dealing with alien abduction". "People who have been kidnapped start collecting", he continued. "They have collecting manias. Some people collect dirt, like specimens. Other people collect plants". Or dolls that resemble their captors. To demonstrate this, he showed me his Barbie Fashion Queen, which, with its bulging eyes, nose defined by two dots, and insectoid face, did seem strikingly similar to the "aliens" described by alleged abductees. "I was about two, and I was visiting my grandmother on a farm in Missouri", he said. "And I remember waking up in the night and seeing this thing looking in the window, this creature - looking in at me with huge eyes. It seemed to float - like, hover - and it kind of glowed. And I remember screaming and yelling for my parents until it finally disappeared".