Welcome to The Doll House: Barbie through the ages

Welcome to The Doll House Barbie through the ages

100 Barbies are sold every minute.

150 countries stock the doll.

250 careers and counting adorn Barbie’s résumé.

$900 was the going price in 1996 for Pink Splendor Barbie, the most expensive Barbie ever produced for retail.

$302,500 is the most a Barbie has ever gone for at auction (thankfully, to raise money for breast cancer research).

1 billion Barbies have been sold globally since 1959.

18 billion minutes of user-generated Barbie content are said to be created every year.

In 1959, Barbara Millicent Roberts into the world an adult woman, with dreams and lots of hair. Since then, hasn’t aged a day – but she’s certainly stature, becoming the world’s most fascinating doll. by Aimee Knight

She’s a swimsuit model and a CEO. As both an airline pilot and a flight attendant, she can navigate an A380 and bring you your complimentary peanuts. In 1992, she even ran for President – 24 years before Hillary’s name appeared on the ballot. Who says women can’t have it all? Not Barbie! The plastic fashionista has been breaking the PVC ceiling for well over half a century, stepping in as a miniature role model for children around the globe. But for just as long, Barbie’s Dreamhouse has been a hotpink hotbed of moral panic.

Scorned for spreading sexist stereotypes, brainwashing kids into mindless consumerism, and implanting young people with unreal ideals about the human form, the world’s most popular fashion doll has a lot to answer for.

Is this a Barbie world? Are we just living in it? With Greta Gerwig’s live-action feature film "Barbie" out now, hop in the candy-colored camper as we trace how this figure of femininity became a beloved, reviled, instantly recognizable icon. Because, in the words of her creator Ruth Handler, “she is far more important than I myself could have ever understood.”

Hailing from the fictional township of Willows, Wisconsin, Barbara Millicent Roberts – as her parents call her – is 11.8 inches tall, 64 years old, and barely looks a day over 20. That’s all thanks to Handler. When masterminding Barbie’s design, she really broke the mold. Well, “borrowed” may be more accurate.

On a European holiday in 1956, Handler chanced upon a German doll called Bild Lilli. Risqué Lilli’s mature proportions set her apart from her infantile peers –those wide-eyed, hard plastic baby dolls of yore. Handler, who just so happened to work at the burgeoning toy company Mattel, naturally took note…plus three Bild Lillis back home to California, where she’d already identified a gap in the market.

Years earlier, while watching her young daughter project grown-up personae onto flimsy paper dolls, Handler had wondered, 'Don’t little girls deserve something more substantial?' When she pitched the idea of a Lilli look-alike to her Mattel colleagues, the largely male staff – including her husband – squirmed. “They didn’t think a doll with breasts was exactly appropriate,” Handler said in 1994. The (m)ad men at Mattel were the first (though certainly not the last) folks to have strong opinions on the doll’s physique. But, after some convincing, they debuted Barbie – named in honor of Handler’s daughter, Barbara – at the American International Toy Fair in 1959.

“A lot of the early marketing was around the idea of Barbie as someone you could grow up to be, as opposed to this baby you had to take care of,” says Dr Madeleine Hunter, whose PhD research at the University of Cambridge explores children’s media franchises. “It was still a very hyper-feminine, heterosexual, white model of femininity, but it was this subtle shift away from training you to care for a child to having these other aspects of adult femininity – the clothes, the fashion – which would appear, for children, to be the privileges and freedoms of adulthood.” For the low, low price of three buckaroos, little girls (being the exclusive target market back in those days) could test-drive lifestyles that veered away from the typically restrictive post-war path of domesticity that was laid out for their mothers. As a glamour model, Barbie had a career –the first of many. She made her own cash and, crucially, she wasn’t married to her boyfriend, Kenneth Sean Carson (aka Ken, named after Handler’s son).

Of course, it’s easy to dismiss Barbie as an empty vessel. “That’s the double bind of femininity,” says Hunter. “It’s ‘girl shaming’. We specifically make these things for girls to like, and then we think of them as stupid because girls like them.” Look harder and you’ll see how Barbie embodies – both figuratively and literally – all the social shifts that have occurred in bedrooms and boardrooms for 60 years and counting.

After thriving in the fashion-forward 1960s, Barbie’s star began to wane amid the 1970s political tumult. Pushback against materialism put a dent in Barbie’s income, while the women’s liberation movement put the doll’s improbable physical proportions under the microscope. “There were protests in Berkeley,” says Hunter. “They burned Barbie.” The tradition continues on TikTok today. But in step with women’s increased social mobility in the 70s came greater flexibility for Barbie, too, as new lines featured bendable limbs, wrists, torsos and necks. In a glow-up reflecting America’s changing tastes, out went her matronly Jackie Kennedy bubble cut, and in swept the long, blonde mane of Malibu Barbie. A super-tanned beach babe with glistening pearly whites, she was the first Barbie whose eyes no longer faced off sideways, but square at her handler with sparkling confidence. She surfed Mattel’s waves of financial instability all the way to the discotheque, alighting in 77 as Superstar Barbie, who heralded an oncoming decade of decadence.

Synonymous with glamour, excess and shopping montages, the 1980s were a new dawn for Barbie. Though the foundations of her playroom empire were laid with the Dreamhouse (which debuted in '62) and Corvette (rolled out in '76), this era cemented her extended universe. She got a cavalcade of new outfits – including diminutive couture by Oscar de la Renta – plus fresh accessories, associates and aspirations.

“We Girls Can Do Anything” went Barbie’s new catchcry in 1985, foreshadowing the “girl power” stylings of 1990s thirdwave feminism. Mattel started broadening not only Barbie’s career prospects but also her cultural heritage, as diverse Barbies appeared on shelves in the traditional dress of such far-flung lands as India, Spain, Peru, Nigeria and Australia (the white Down Under doll came decked in a brown denim outfit described as “typical of an outback jillaroo" - sheep rancher).

Hunter agrees that the 80s were “a big decade” for Barbie. “Celebrity becomes a much more important part of Barbie’s identity,” she explains. “She’s very much in keeping with different trends that people idolize,” like the pop star, the rapper, the actress and the pageant queen. As such, parents, teachers and child psychologists further interrogated Barbie’s part in crystallizing society’s notion of femininity as one that’s thin, white and superficial. In response to this critique, Mattel further diversified Barbie’s body shapes, skin tones and physical abilities. What’s more, in a nod to the 21st-century maxim, “If she can see it, she can be it,” Barbie now regularly steps out in the real-life likenesses of her “Sheroes” – such as artist Frida Kahlo, aviator Amelia Earhart, Paralympian Madison de Rozario and tennis champ Naomi Osaka, whose mini-me sold out within hours of going on sale in 2021.

“If Barbie is the only toy your child is playing [with], and they’re only watching Barbie cartoons, and they only have Barbie merchandise, yeah, maybe that could be a problem,” says Hunter. “But chances are, she’s one figure in a much larger diet of media, as well as a much larger representation of women that your child encounters every day –including you. It’s a lot of responsibility to put on one doll.” Citing Mattel’s contemporary sales pitch that Barbie can be anything, Hunter adds, “She shouldn’t have to be everything.”

It’s at this time we must ask not what your Barbie can do for you, but what you can do for your Barbie.

“I have two dolls I travel with,” says Nerida Stig, a Brisbanebased Barbie connoisseur. “One is named Margie after my mother, Marjorie. She goes everywhere with me.”

Stig has travelled with Margie for 12 years, attending doll conventions across Australia and the U.S. (the pair were “living and breathing” pink at Barbie Con in Florida, July 4-8). Her ever-growing collection is easily in the hundreds, and her fascination goes back to her very first Growin’ Pretty Hair Barbie in childhood. “I got so much pleasure out of that doll, it was ridiculous,” she says. “My neighbors got Malibus and we played, and played, and played, the three of us. I always liked the fashion.”

Hello Dollies

1955

GERMANY’S BILD LILLI LAUNCHES, SOON TO INSPIRE MATTEL’S ALLAMERICAN GIRL.

1959

BARBIE DEBUTS AT THE NEW YORK TOY FAIR ON MARCH 9.

1961

BOYFRIEND KENNETH SEAN CARSON – AKA JUST KEN – ARRIVES IN BARBIE’S LIFE. FOLLOWED BY BEST FRIEND MIDGE IN ’63, AND LITTLE SISTER SKIPPER IN ’64.

1962

THE ICONIC DREAMHOUSE HITS SHELVES, WITH FURNITURE AND ACCESSORIES MADE NOT FROM PLASTIC BUT CARDBOARD.

1965

SPACE IS THE PLACE FOR ASTRONAUT BARBIE, WHO WENT TO THE MOON FOUR YEARS BEFORE APOLLO 11 TOUCHED DOWN.

1968

MEET CHRISTIE! BARBIE’S FIRST BLACK FRIEND WAS INTRODUCED IN STEP WITH THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT.

1971

BARBIE HITS ANDOUTDOORSEXPLORES CAMPERVAN.

1980

MATTEL RELEASES THE FIRST BLACK AND LATINA BARBIES.

1985

IT’S A TAKEOVER:PASTEL DAY-TO-NIGHT BARBIE GETS SHOULDER PADS, A BRIEFCASE AND A CEO SEAT AT THE TABLE.

1992

TOTALLY HAIR BARBIE – AVAILABLE IN BLONDE AND, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 20 BRUNETTEYEARS,–BECOMES THE BESTSELLING BARBIE OF ALL TIME, WITH OVER 10 MILLION SOLD TO DATE.

2016

MATTEL RELEASES THREE NEW BARBIE BODY TYPES – CURVY, PETITE AND TALL – TO BETTER REFLECT THE DIVERSITY OF REALLIFE HUMANS.

2021

PINK GOES GREEN WITH THE LAUNCH OF BARBIE LOVES THE OCEAN, THE FIRST OF HER KIND MADE FROM RECYCLED OCEAN-BOUND PLASTIC. MATTEL HOPES TO USE 100 PER CENT RECYCLED, RECYCLABLE OR BIO-BASED PLASTICS BY 2030.

While today she may not play with her dolls in the traditional sense – she’s not hosting tea parties, let alone doll-on-doll make-out sessions – a sense of fun, frivolity and freedom rings in her fandom. “My collection is part of me. It’s part of my home,” Stig explains. “It’s not about the money to me. It’s the friendships I’ve made over the last 20-something years of collecting. I have friends all over the world.”

And Stig’s not the only one who’s been inspired by Barbie the blank canvas. The passive doll, and all her pliable possibilities, have long had a symbiotic relationship with pop culture. In 1986, Andy Warhol – who once famously proclaimed, “I love plastic. I want to be plastic” – painted Barbie’s pastel portrait. Thirty years later, his wish came true when his muse donned his trademark 1960s look (black jeans, biker jacket, icy white wig) for a limited-edition collectable figure.

Forever dedicated to caring for others, Barbie also provides artistic fuel for her detractors – just take a look at the satirical Instagram accounts starring Barbie as a coffee-swilling hipster, an inspirational mommy blogger, and a white savior preaching wellness culture in African countries. Barbie’s malleable capacity to be dressed up and down, perpetually made over, also drives Greta Gerwig’s irreverent (yet affectionate) take on the doll’s multitudes in her film.

Though the Barbie brand went multiplatform some years back – via video games, web series and CGI-animated films – the doll remains, primarily, an analogue plaything. Her highestselling incarnation is still 1992’s Totally Hair Barbie, whose opulent locks offered hours, days, of touchy-feely play that’s inherently different to the screen-centric modes that prevail nowadays.

“I never dreamed of trying to change the world. I wanted to show the world as it is,” Handler once said. “My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be.” It’s the dreams, fears and secrets whispered by whoever looks upon Barbie’s golden coiffe that truly mobilize her posable limbs and drive her conversations –not to mention her Corvette. She may be a model, a prop, a mirror, a money pit, a surgeon, a blank slate, a confidante and an icon, but – above all – Barbie is what we make her. Think pink.

Courtesy of the International Network of Street Papers (www.insp.ngo) and The Big Issue Australia.