Plastic fantastic
Feminist foe or marketing masterpiece, Barbie’s been courting controversy from even before she went on sale 64 years ago. Love or hate her, there’s no denying she’s shaped a generation. Virginia Fallon reports.
Aspinal unit might not sound the likeliest place for eye-watering laughter, but it was more common than you’d think. Much of it was gallows humour and on this 1997 occasion, Share-a-Smile Becky, Barbie’s ‘‘differently-abled friend’’, had everyone beside themselves.
Becky was a badass. Both a Paralympian and school photographer, she used a wheelchair to get about, leading to applause from disability advocates and 6000 dolls selling in the first week.
So why the howls of mirth echoing throughout the wards back then? Becky, as it turned out, couldn’t fit her wheelchair through the door of Barbie’s Dreamhouse.
When a former patient wheeled in to deposit both Becky and the inaccessible house on the nurse’s station at Christchurch’s Burwood Hospital, the ensuing hilarity signalled a major mistake by the Mattel company.
By then, Barbie had been in production for 38 years, becoming a market behemoth from almost the moment of release and plagued by controversy from even before that.
There are two stories most often cited for Ruth Handler’s inspiration for the doll she named after her daughter Barbara. The first is that when she saw the child playing with paper dolls she wanted to create a more realistic toy representing what girls want to be.
The other is that the original design was based on a German doll named Bild Lilli, which was in turn based on a racy cartoon and whose adult proportions differed from other dolls at the time.
Nonetheless, in 1959 Barbie was born and the rest, as they say, is history. The dolls are currently sold in 150 countries worldwide at a rate of more than 100 every minute and a total of 58 million annually. A Dreamhouse is bought every two minutes.
After years of struggling in the age of digital toys, Mattel’s profits surged by 47% in 2021, to $1.35b and a six-year high. Boxed vintage Barbies, such as Ponytail Number One, can achieve more than $20,000 at auction.
Love or hate her, there’s no denying the popularity of Barbara Millicent Roberts. And now aged 64, the divisive doll has her own live-action film coming in July, starring Margot Robbie as the pneumatic blonde and Ryan Gosling as Ken, her most popular accessory.
Trailers feature Robbie kitted out in the icon’s trademark clothes and blonde do, Gosling with her companion’s trademark abs, and a pink-hued world instantly recognisable to generations.
Will we be scoffing? Of course. Will we be watching? Hell yes.
Or at least some of us will. While experts say the Barbie brand is a cash cow resulting from slick marketing and a willingness to adapt, the doll was contentious even before consumers got their hands on it.
Mothers in a 1958 Mattel-sponsored market study condemned it for having ‘‘too much of a figure’’, sparking criticism of the dolls’ idealisation for thin, white and able-bodied women that continues to this day.
Barbie is also commonly banned in the Middle East for encouraging un-Islamic dress codes, as well as in Russia where President Vladimir Putin accused the doll of corrupting the minds of children.
Amongst the backlash Barbie faces in the West are myriad comparisons to what she’d look like in real life. ‘‘If Barbie were a real woman...’’ it always begins, and you can fill in whatever you were told as a kid.
For me, it was she wouldn’t have room for internal organs though I loved my Peaches and Cream Barbie whose part in later decades of eating disorders to this day remains unknown.
Nonetheless, the doll seemed held to different standards than other toys. The cartoonish Strawberry Shortcakes and Cabbage Patch Kids slipped through the criticism, as did the action men who were all muscles and comfortingly missing private bits.
Barbie, on the other hand, copped it. She might have been a ballerina, farmer, astrophysicist and pilot, but what she could never be was one of us.
Proving that, was US college student Galia Slayen, who in 2011 made a life-size Barbie finding not only did the large breasts and stick-thin legs threaten to topple her over, but her body mass index would see her classed as anorexic.
‘‘She likely would not menstruate... she’d have to walk on all fours due to her proportions,’’ Slayen wrote in the Huffington Post.
Clinical psychologist Dougal Sutherland says that although we can’t blame Barbie for everything, there’s no doubt she joins other children’s toys that contribute to gender cliche´ s.
‘‘Traditional feminine toys are geared towards caretaking and looks, emphasising those things are important. Stereotypical boys’ toys are rough-andtumble or model risk-taking – another nudge towards different roles in adulthood.’’
As for Barbie’s appearance, Sutherland says the doll reinforces the stereotypes of what a woman’s body should look like and what roles she should take. And while Mattel has diversified her professions, one thing remains the same. ‘‘She can be a vet or astronaut, but she has to be a pretty and shapely vet or astronaut.’’
Mattel hasn’t only changed Barbie’s jobs but long ago began its bid for diversity, or at least the dollars that bought.
By 1968 Barbie had ‘‘friends’’ of colour though it
‘‘The crux is they’ve evolved the product... If they’d stayed on course with original Barbie they would have been out of business long ago. Evolve or die.’’
Bodo Lang
University of Auckland marketing expert
wasn’t until 1980 that the doll herself was released in an African American incarnation. Despite that, Black Barbie was only a painted version of the original, and it took Mattel 29 years to launch a collection with non-white features.
The company went on to produce a Rosa Parks Barbie, a transgender Barbie, as well as one with vitiligo. Its first hijab-wearing character, based on the Olympian fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, was released in 2018, arriving two years after Curvy Barbie with a protruding tummy.
Becky, for her sins, quickly disappeared from 1997 shelves amidst promises to fix the access issues and although by 2017 she reportedly still didn’t manage to actually get into the house, the company didn’t give up. A 2020 Wheelchair Barbie was such a success that Wheelchair Ken followed suit.
While critics have derided Mattel’s inclusion efforts as tokenistic – and for how Barbies of colour used to cost more than the standard blonde – new iterations keep coming.
Barbie’s little sister Chelsea with scoliosis, sporting a removable back brace, appeared on shelves in January, as did another aimed at preschoolers. My First Barbie has a larger waist, longer hair for easier brushing and permanently attached underpants.
Patsy Carlyle won’t hear a bad word about Barbie; understandable given she owns New Zealand’s largest collection of boxed dolls. Speaking from her Helensville home, nicknamed The Pink Palace, the collector struggles when asked just how many Barbies she has, estimating there are about 1600 in boxes and another 400 or 500 loose in the house.
‘‘It started as a bit of a joke to be honest, then it got a little out of hand.’’
She’s been collecting for decades, naming the 80s issues, and particularly Peaches and Cream Barbie, as her favourites. Her collection is worth thousands of dollars but Carlyle says that’s not what it’s all about.
During regular tours and talks at her home, she loves the joy her collection brings visitors and children often go home with a Barbie or Ken of their own. ‘‘It’s the fun of finding them, as well as the whole collecting community. My dream is to donate them all to a museum so everyone can enjoy them.’’
Although Carlyle doesn’t care about the money, there’s no denying Barbies fetch big bucks. In 2010, a diamond-dripping customdesigned doll sold in the US for a recordbreaking $302,500, and here in Aotearoa fans regularly fork out for collector items.
Trade Me spokesperson Ruby Topzand says of the more than 1200 listings on the site, the most expensive is a 2002 pregnant Barbie, Ken and child set with a buy-now price of $600.
Last year’s most expensive Barbie was a ‘‘very rare’’ 1175 Live Action Christie Barbie Doll sold for $870, while a Queen Elizabeth Platinum Jubilee Barbie sold for $705. Anyone who missed out on the latter can purchase one currently listed with a buy-now of $500. The site saw a spike in popularity in 2021,with a 23% jump in sales when compared with the year before. And although that levelled off a bit, the dolls are still a hot item. ‘‘Last month we saw 8900 searches for ‘Barbie’ and other related items onsite. This includes searches for items like ‘Barbie house’, ‘Barbie car’ and ‘Barbie clothes’.’’ Bodo Lang, a marketing expert at the University of Auckland, says Mattel nailed it with Barbie. ‘‘Everything around the doll has been an unbelievable success; what we call ‘a cash cow’.’’
Barbie hit the consumer nerve right from the get-go as a mass-produced, high quality item produced in ‘‘exciting plastic’’, which was a novel material back then, says Lang. ‘‘They were focusing on fashion and beauty to begin with. She’s very pretty; magnifying the female body and tapping in to how women feel they need to look and how men think they ought to look.’’ Initially marketed in print and on daytime television to the stay-at-home women of the time, in following decades Barbie portrayed the more independent women’s movement, focusing on female empowerment.
The 80s saw a launch of merchandise, such as real-life bags, clothes and jewellery, selling Barbie as a lifestyle. Then came those ‘‘diverse’’ Barbies in a move Lang says was both financially successful and fulfilled a responsibility consumers expected from big brands.
‘‘The crux is they’ve evolved the product... If they’d stayed on course with original Barbie they would have been out of business long ago. Evolve or die.’’
As for the critical lens so often taken to the doll’s portrayal of women, Lang says we love to loathe big business and there’s no doubt Barbie belongs to a global giant. Besides, you can use the same argument for pretty much any doll.
‘‘I had Ken and his arms – no human looks like him.’’ were monstrous