Barbie celebrates 65th birthday in diverse doll landscape
AT 65, Barbie shows no signs of retiring from her 250 different jobs as a plastic and fantastic doll whose small feet have left a big cultural mark on the human world.
The original Mattel Barbie, with her iconic blonde hair, black and white bathing suit and eyes angled to the side, was inspired by creator Ruth Handler’s daughter, Barbara, in 1959.
However, in 2024, as Barbie celebrates her 65th anniversary, the dolls will be produced in a diversity of colors, hair textures, body shapes, and more. “Barbie used to be a more singular reflection of beauty and more onedimensional. Today, there are many Barbies and we’ve got multiple views of the brand,” Executive Vice President and Global Head of Barbie & Dolls Lisa McKnight told Reuters at the Mattel Design Center in Los Angeles.
Barbies come in 35 skin tones, 97 hairstyles, and nine body types, including dolls with wheelchairs, Down syndrome, vitiligo, plus-sizes and genderneutral dolls.
The doll has also become a fashion icon, recently inspiring Barbiecore and helping many renowned hair stylists and clothing designers, like Karl Lagerfeld, get their start.
Adding to the brand’s evolution, the commercial success of the 2023 eighttime Oscar-nominated “Barbie” movie directed by Greta Gerwig, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, added a new emotional depth to the doll.
However, this gain did not come overnight. “I’m grateful I didn’t grow up with Barbie,” women rights activist Gloria Steinem said in the 2018 Barbie documentary on Hulu, “Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie.” “Barbie was everything we did want to be and was being told to be,” she added, referring to her work as a second-wave feminist advocating for equality in the 1960s and 1970s.
To this day, the doll is still associated by some with unrealistic body proportions, gender roles and Eurocentric beauty standards.
While considering these concerns, Mattel keeps adding multifaceted dolls to be pretty in pink.
The brand is open to different voices that go beyond that of its designers. “What’s most important for us is that we take on board consultation from all kinds of communities when we were signing,” said Kim Culmone, Mattel’s vice president of Barbie Design.
While expanding, however, some things remain true for the toy brand, including hand-painting Barbies and using the same sewing machines that have been around since 1959.
Whether it is hand-sculpting new dolls or operating advanced 3D printers, the brand is open to change.
The 65th-anniversary dolls, created by the Filipino lead designer for Barbie Signature, Carlyle Nuera, reimagine the original Barbie suit as a black-and-white gown accompanied by white cat-eye sunglasses.
Rather than just the classic white doll with blonde hair, there is also a Black doll with braids and laid edges, a popular style for Black women that includes soft and sleek baby hair. “If we continued to do the same thing that we’ve done before, over and over again, Barbie would not be the success that she is today,” Culmone said.