‘I DESIGNED BARBIE CLOTHES’ The woman behind the style icon
As Barbie turns 60, Carol Spencer looks back at the decades she spent creating outfits for the world’s most famous – and controversial – doll
Twirly Curls Barbie. Crisp ’N Cool Barbie. Totally Hair Barbie. Great Shape Barbie. It’s been nearly six decades since Carol Spencer began her career creating fashions for the iconic doll, but the 86-year-old designer can still recall the names of nearly all of the hundreds of versions lovingly displayed in her Los Angeles home. “I’ve lost track of how many I have,” she says. “But it’s a lot!” Spencer, who designed thousands of looks for Barbie over a 35-year career at Mattel, chronicles her journey in a new book,
Dressing Barbie, published to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the doll’s creation. Working with her hands took a physical toll over the years: “I went to get my driver’s licence and they couldn’t get a thumbprint – I don’t have all the grooves!”
And there was controversy along the way: Barbie’s busty yet wasp-waisted physique – not to mention her permanently high-heel-ready feet – faced criticism for promoting an unhealthy, unrealistic body image. Spencer acknowledges the point. “Times are changing and we’re all evolving,” she says. “But I don’t think she was so out of proportion – people don’t understand doll scale. And she’s a doll! Part of Barbie will always be fantasy.”
Spencer first found her way into Barbie’s orbit, in fact, because she chafed at the traditional gender roles on offer when she was growing up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Career opportunities for girls were “largely focused on the ‘expected’ five: nurse,
“Barbie will always be fantasy”
teacher, secretary, shopgirl and seamstress,” she writes. Eager to get into designing, “I scraped money together to buy fabric, and I started making my own clothes.”
Stints at various fashion houses followed, and in 1963, just four years after co-founders Elliot and Ruth Handler released the first Barbie doll (named after the Handlers’ daughter), she was hired at Mattel. “My role was mostly creating fashion with a theme,” says Spencer, who often looked to her own wardrobe for inspiration. “Barbie became a big sister, a friend, a parent.”
Barbie’s style evolved over the decades, and the doll herself underwent multiple
The evolution Barbie of style
transformations. “She became more and more lifelike,” says Spencer, “with bendable arms and legs.” Her professions changed, too. “We’d do market research, and parents would say it was unwholesome for kids to play with a doll who was a fashion model.” So along came Surgeon Barbie, Astronaut Barbie and Gold Medal Barbie. “During the women’s movement [all of us designers] belonged to the National Organisation for Women, but we didn’t flaunt it,” Spencer says. “It was this quiet goal to start promoting women. I wanted more choices for Barbie. I wanted more choices for myself!”
As Spencer began designing for international versions of the doll, her work took her around the world. She retired in 1998, years before perhaps the most significant change in the Barbie empire: the 2016 addition of hips, a rounder belly and flat feet. “It’s lovely,” Spencer says.
Looking back, she takes pride in the hours of fun her creations brought to millions. (Today, an estimated 100 Barbies are sold every minute.) Though she never married or had children, “I thought of every child as my child,” she says. “Seeing them play was wonderful. It gave me a sense of satisfaction that I was going in the right direction.”
And that’s a long way from where she began. “As a little girl in Minnesota, we used to dig in the dirt trying to get to China,” she says with a laugh. “Well, I got myself to China, and all over the world. Barbie changed my life.”