“We could have called the app Toca Dress-Up,” he laughs. “She was prettier before we changed her,” says Jeffery, pulling out his iPhone to show me an earlier version: a blue-eyed blonde, her hair sculpted in waves. The girl is brunette, with big eyes but few other attributes of Disney girlhood. These are the paper dolls of the digital age, complete with an option to apply your own photo to a T-shirt or dress. In Toca Tailor, for example, you choose to dress a boy, a girl, a lynx, or a hairy creature who looks a lot like Animal from “The Muppet Show.” The app lets you choose clothes and accessories (hats, shoes, sunglasses), then customize with an array of patterns and findings. Björn Jeffery, who was in New York for the American International Toy Fair. Earlier this spring I met with the Toca Boca co-founder and C.E.O. I hoped that their simplicity, their homely themes, their oddball and unbeautiful avatars were all part of a plan.

A best-selling one, as I quickly found out: thirty-one and a half million downloads, and six of the top ten paid education apps on the iPhone. Toca Tailor, Toca Robot Lab, Toca Kitchen, and Toca Band seemed like a pink-princess-free paradise. Given my frustration with the lack of unisex options in kids’ clothes and toys, Toca House and other games from the same maker quickly populated my iPhone and iPad. If elegance is refusal, Toca Boca was my first encounter with elegance for children in the App Store. Second, you can play forever, moving from room to room, task to task, rewarded only by a little trumpet fanfare. No aprons, no nannies, no licensed characters. First, your avatar choices include a giant yellow monster wearing a flower wreath, a little boy in a red t-shirt, and a creature whose head looks like a pink house. My children took to the app right away, so quickly that it took me some time to realize its subversive qualities in the world of children’s media.

Toca boca monster