10/24/2014
Barbie (Doll) - News - Times Topics - The New York Times
Barbie (Doll)
By Yona Zeldis McDonough
Overview
Barbie, the single most successful doll ever produced, was the invention of Ruth Handler, one of the
founders of the fledgling toy and novelty company, Mattel.
The petite plastic doll, named after her daughter, Barbara, made its debut on March 9, 1959 at the
American International Toy Fair in New York City. For the occasion, Barbie wore a black and white
striped bathing suit, shoes and sunglasses. Her price was $3, a modest sum even then. A handful of
outfits was displayed alongside her, costing between $1 and $3.
At least half of the Toy Fair buyers wanted nothing to do with Barbie. There was the body, for starters,
with breasts, a small waist and long legs. Then there was her expression: sullen, knowing and
strangely covert. Her eyes were thickly rimmed with dark eyeliner; her lips, a candy-apple red.
Despite the initial coolness of her reception at the Toy Fair, Barbie was flying off the shelves by the
summer of 1959, and stores could not keep Barbie in stock.
In her rich and varied existence, Barbie has had stints as a model, astronaut, paleontologist, Air Force
jet pilot, surgeon, NASCAR driver and a rap artist. She has sung on the Grand Ole Opry, played
basketball with the WNBA and run for president three times. Mattel recently conducted an online
vote, asking people to select Barbie’s 125th career: Computer engineer was the winning choice.
Barbie has morphed into a legend and an icon. For Barbie is both mirror and model, reflection and
avatar.
A Star Is Born
Barbie was born during the golden age of American post-World War II prosperity with its lushly
saturated Technicolor movies, tidy new suburbs and cars as large as beached whales.
In the early 1950s, Mrs. Handler got the idea of creating an adult doll after observing her daughter’s
fascination with adult paper dolls, whose clothing she was able to change.
Mrs. Handler envisioned a doll onto which girls could project their desire to act like, and indeed
become, grown women. But the designers at Mattel initially balked, saying the level of detail that she
wanted would make the doll prohibitively expensive.
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“That was the official reason,” Mrs. Handler recalled in the 1994 book, “Dream Doll: The Ruth
Handler Story,” which she co-wrote with Jacqueline Shannon. “But I really think the squeamishness
of those designers — every single one of them male — stemmed mostly from the fact that the doll
would have breasts.”
Mrs. Handler’s idea got a jump start when her family traveled to Lucerne, Switzerland, and came
across a shop window with 11-inch adult style dolls, all with identical faces but each wearing a
different ski outfit. The object, familiar to German-speaking Europeans, was known as the Bild Lili, a
blonde, pony-tailed character that appeared regularly in a comic strip published in the German
newspaper Bild Zeitung. Unable to buy Bild Lili outfits separately, Mrs. Handler bought two of the
dolls, and another one the next day in Vienna.
Mrs. Handler grasped the importance of separating the dolls from the outfits, and the doll plus outfits
equation would become an essential part of the larger Barbie calculus.
In 1957, Mrs. Handler was able to persuade Mattel designers to produce a prototype.
The Business of Barbie
Eight months after Barbie’s debut at the Toy Fair, Mrs. Handler was, according to the Los Angeles
Times, driving a pink Thunderbird and running a half-million-dollar business.
Barbie sales continued strong throughout the early 1960s; her clothing, her accoutrements, and her
Dream House adding to skyrocketing success. In 1961, Mattel brought out the ultimate Barbie
accessory: Ken, Barbie’s square-jawed, crew-cut sporting steady beau named for Mrs. Handler’s son.
In the late 1960s, with the women’s liberation movement, Barbie seemed out of step with the new
social reality and faltered a bit. By 1971, the National Organization for Women had launched a full
frontal assault on Barbie, condemning Mattel, as well as several other companies, for sexist
advertising.
But that was the least of Mattel’s troubles. After a period of diversification — the company began
manufacturing hamster cages, aquariums and pet supplies — the toy behemoth experienced a
downturn, showing losses in quarter after quarter. Stock prices tumbled and in 1973, Mrs. Handler was
forced to resign as president.
But in 1981, Jill Barad, a wunderkind executive at Coty Cosmetics, came on board. By the time she
was made chief executive officer of Mattel in 1992, Barbie had returned to the limelight. As M. G.
Lord, the author of the book, “Forever Barbie,” put it, the doll was clearly “positioned as a career
woman who knew what it took to achieve in the business world.”
The Barbie Backlash
There has always been a Barbie backlash; mothers who refused to buy her, women who actively
bashed her. Journalist-turned-novelist Anna Quindlen fantasized about driving a “silver lamé stake”
through Barbie’s plastic heart; Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Carol Shields said Barbie’s expression,
with “its dumb shine of self-absorption, its trippingly tartish look of one who is out for all she can
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get,” is “eerily disturbing.”
Barbie has been held responsible for eating disorders and charged with offering girls a wholly
unrealistic body image. A typical Barbie doll is 11.5 inches, which, at a 1/6 scale, would make her 5
feet 9 inches tall. Her vital statistics have been estimated at 36 inches (bust), 18 inches (waist) and 33
inches (hips). According to a study by the University Central Hospital in Helsinki, Finland, she would
lack the 17 to 22 percent body fat required for a woman to menstruate. Slumber Party Barbie, who
made her debut in 1965, came with a book entitled “How to Lose Weight” — one of its more succinct
but pertinent tips was “Don’t Eat.”
Mattel has said that Barbie’s waist was originally made so tiny because the waistbands of clothes that
she wore, with their seams, snaps, and zippers, added bulk to her figure.
In 1998, Mattel introduced Really Rad Barbie, a doll whose waist was wider and bust smaller, thus
reflecting a more “real” female body type.
Barbie and Race
The Barbie clan began its life as white and remained so until 1967, when “Colored Francie” made her
debut. But this Francie doll was produced using the existing head molds for the white Francie, and,
other than her dark skin, lacked any other distinguishing African features. The first African American
doll in the Barbie circle is usually regarded as Christie, who appeared in 1968. It wasn’t until 1980
that actual black and Hispanic Barbie dolls hit the market. Yet despite Mattel’s attempt to take a more
racially sensitive stance, Ann Ducille, professor of American and African-American literature at the
University of California, San Diego, contends that “white Barbie dolls (are) the norm. Black Barbie is
toyland’s ‘but also’ just as black people are society’s ‘but also.’” Professor DuCille quotes a black
mother who said that although her daughter played with a black Barbie, she still asked for “the real
Barbie.”
In 1967, Mattel and Nabisco embarked on a cross-promotion of Barbie and Oreo cookies. Oreo Fun
Barbie offered girls the chance to play while sharing “America’s favorite cookie.” As had become the
norm, Mattel manufactured both a white and black version of the doll, apparently unaware that in the
African American community “Oreo” has long been a derogatory term for a person who is “black on
the outside and white on the inside,” like the chocolate sandwich cookie itself. Black critics took the
doll to task and she did very poorly in the marketplace; Mattel recalled the unsold stock, making it
highly prized by collectors.
Enduring Barbie
Part of Barbie’s power is the kind of projection she invites. “I designed Barbie with a blank face so
that the child could project her own dreams of the future onto Barbie,” Handler said in her book,
“Dream Doll.” “I never wanted to play up the glamorous life of Barbie. I wanted the owner to create a
personality for the doll.” Even the talking Barbies that appeared on the market never enjoyed the
ascendancy that the mute, yet eloquent dolls did.
Barbie was both a child of her time and completely cutting edge. As the historian and author Stephanie
Coontz has written, “the marketability of toys like Barbie…was a logical though ironic extension of
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1950s gender roles, marital norms and consumerist values.” Early outfits produced by Mattel had
names like Theatre Date, Movie Date, Party Date, Friday Nite Date and Sorority Meeting, all of which
suggest that Barbie was not about to challenge anyone’s idea of traditional femininity. But what about
Tennis Anyone, Ski Queen, Icebreaker, Career Girl and Graduation, which were outfits sold in 1962?
Such names had the spark of an alternative narrative; clearly there was something beyond dating on
Barbie agenda.
Family of Barbie
Barbie has younger sisters (Skipper, Stacie, Kelly, Krissy, the short-lived twins, Tutti and Todd),
cousins (Francie and Jazzie), friends (Midge, Miko, Whitney, Nikki, Devon, Kira, to name a few) and
of course, the steadfast Ken. But her parents played a minimal — and totally off-stage — role; no
parent dolls were ever produced. She is an agent on her own behalf, a singular sensation, living her
own life, forging her own destiny. In all the scenarios in which she has played, the one role Barbie
never took on was that of wife, even though Mattel has made numerous bridal ensembles for her. Ken,
for all his virile good looks and affable charm, really is an accessory.
Indeed, Mattel announced on Feb. 12, 2010, that Barbie and Ken, sweethearts for 43 years, are
splitting up. According to the press release, the pair had grown apart and “needed some time alone”
though “they would remain friends.” Whether the split is real or a publicity stunt to spark interest in
the doll remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: to those in the know, Barbie’s main act was, is
and will always be solo.
World of Barbie
Through computer animation, Barbie has become the star of several feature films, including “Barbie in
the Nutcracker,” “Barbie as Rapunzel,” “Barbie of Swan Lake” and “Barbie as the Princess and the
Pauper.” And she has staked her claim on the Web with the popular Make Up Barbie Game, which
allows girls to alter her hair, makeup and overall look.
In the late 1990s, computer technology boomed, and in 1996, Mattel launched www.barbie.com, the
official Barbie website. In 1998, “My Design” was introduced on the site, allowing girls and collectors
to decide what their Barbie doll friend would look like by choosing her hair/eye/makeup colors,
fashion, accessories, and personality traits.
And Barbie’s reach has extended still further, to the vast sub-cult of adult Barbie worshippers, those
grownups who collect, display, buy, sell and for whom the words “mint in box” have a freighted
significance. Today, Barbie Collector has a website all its own, www.barbiecollector.com. The
collector line now even has a dedicated online store at www.barbiecollectiblesstore.com.
Mattel estimates that there are more than 100,000 active Barbie collectors, 90 percent of whom are
women with an average age of 40. Forty-five percent of them spend more than $1,000 a year on their
dolls. Vintage Barbie dolls are the most valuable: a mint-in-box from 1959 sold for $3,552.50 on eBay
in October 2004. (It originally sold for $3.)
The highest price so far to be paid for a Barbie was at a Christie’s auction in London on Sept. 25,
2006. This was a 1965 Barbie dressed in Midnight Red, which had been part of a private collection of
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4,000 Barbie dolls. The Barbie was sold for 9,000 sterling pounds (U.S. $17,000). She was sold by
two Dutch women, Letje Raebel and her daughter, Marina.
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ARTICLES ABOUT BARBIE (DOLL)
The Chatter for Sunday, Feb. 16
Notable quotes from business articles that appeared in The New York Times last week.
February 16, 2014, Sunday
MORE ON BARBIE (DOLL) AND: Speeches and Statements , United States Politics and
Government , Barbie (Doll) , Travel and Vacations
Barbie’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue Causes a Stir Online
By STUART ELLIOTT
Mattel and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue have joined forces for the forthcoming issue.
February 12, 2014, Wednesday
MORE ON BARBIE (DOLL) AND: Women and Girls , Sports Illustrated , Barbie (Doll) ,
Advertising and Marketing
Leaving Behind Malibu in Search of a New Dream Home
By STUART ELLIOTT
Mattel’s new campaign will culminate with a disclosure of Barbie’s new home, which will come out
in the fall.
February 7, 2013, Thursday
MORE ON BARBIE (DOLL) AND: Barbie (Doll) , Advertising and Marketing , Mattel Inc , Real
Estate and Housing (Residential) , Toys
Judges Cut Back Damages Owed by Mattel in Doll Case
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mattel won’t have to pay the maker of Bratz dolls $172 million of an initial $309 million in damages,
but it might not be the last word in the dispute.
January 25, 2013, Friday
MORE ON BARBIE (DOLL) AND: Bratz (Doll) , Barbie (Doll) , Mattel Inc , MGA Entertainment ,
Decisions and Verdicts , Carter, David , Suits and Litigation
More Dads Buy the Toys, So Barbie, and Stores, Get Makeovers
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
Fathers are doing more of the family shopping just as girls are being steered toward toys that develop
math skills.
December 4, 2012, Tuesday
MORE ON BARBIE (DOLL) AND: Toys , Women and Girls , Consumer Behavior , Barbie (Doll) ,
Parenting , Mega Bloks Incorporated , Mattel Inc , Lego Group , Shopping and Retail , Men and Boys
Go Directly, Digitally to Jail? Classic Toys Learn New Clicks
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