rarely rains in the birthplace of Barbie. The weather oscil-
lates between beach and brunch appropriate. And yet for a
five-day stretch in February, it’s raining in the Los Angeles
suburbs. From the 10th floor of the Mattel tower, the flat city-
scape blurs into a field of gray. The conference room is also
hopelessly colorless, punctuated only by the hot pink and
purple posters on the wall opposite the windows.
OUR PROMISE: We create the experiences that capture
kids’ hearts, open their minds, and unlock their potential
through play.
OUR PURPOSE: We inspire wonder in the next generation
to shape a brighter tomorrow.
I have been invited to Mattel on the occasion of Barbie’s
60th birthday. My story pitch was: Barbie’s 60! What’s going
on with her? And the answer is: wow, a lot. Barbie was
named after Barbara, the daughter of Mattel founders Elliot
and Ruth Handler, the latter of whom was the doll’s creator.
In 1959, Barbie seemed to serve more as a mannequin, not a
mirror. But she grew up to be an 11-inch plastic projection of
what it means to be an adult woman in the world.
In the past several years, that projection has been
reflected back from a wider, oft-ignored swath of the female
population. The average American woman wears a size 16 or
18, and the Barbie line now includes dolls that represent a
larger silhouette. More than one in four Americans has a
mental or physical disability, and Mattel has debuted a doll
in a wheelchair and one with a prosthetic leg.
Despite Barbie’s new iterations, she doesn’t age. At 60,
Barbie still looks 27. Her skin is as taut as an Apple laptop,
and her thick, not-at-all-menopausal hair radiates with syn-
thetic luster. Barbie has integrated herself seamlessly into
the fabric of American culture, and unlike the social hand-
cuffs that come with aging in today’s society, she continues
to flourish. The quintessential doll has a 98 percent
brand-awareness rate worldwide, meaning you are more
likely to have heard of her than almost anything else.
Barbie is the original influencer. No doll (or human, really)
has procured a larger following, with people and trends lap-
ping at her invisible Barbie heels. Three years before Working
Girl premiered, Day-to-Night Barbie debuted, wearing a skirt
suit that transitioned into tulle cocktail attire. Two years after
the United States began a 42-day air strike on Iraq, Desert
Storm Barbie appeared, dressed in an “authentic desert bat-
tle uniform” and a maroon beret recalling the U.S. Air Force.
Barbie has had more careers than most people have had
vacations, from doctor to zoo doctor to ballerina to, pres-
ently, robotics engineer and Instagram star.
As a brand, Barbie has been central to Mattel—100 dolls
are sold every minute, according to Lisa McKnight, global
general manager and senior vice president for Barbie. In an
industry that is losing ground to tech-forward toys, Barbie
reported 12 percent growth in gross sales in the last quarter
of 2018, a rise attributed in part to a more diverse array of
dolls that resonate better with socially conscious parents.
This is fine and all, but as every person and doll knows,
time is a single-lane freeway hurtling us toward the unknown,
or to a landfill outside Albany. Barbie, despite her six decades
of trailblazing, is still a work in progress. “We’ve got to keep
pushing because society changes so rapidly,” says Kim
Culmone, senior vice president of design for Barbie. “We
want to stay in step with that.” Meaning: Barbie has to contin-
ually stay relevant, a shining beacon inspiring wonder, ignit-
ing the ambitions of young children for a lifetime of brighter
tomorrows, or at least until they move on to riding bikes.
For me, it means journeying deep within Mattel’s nucleus
to play with some dolls.On March 9, 1959, Barbara Millicent Roberts entered the
world wearing a black-and-white swimsuit.
If Ruth Handler is Barbie’s mother, then Bild Lilli—the
German doll intended as a risqué gag gift for men—is her
deceased sister, whose spirit has haunted Barbie’s legacy
for the better part of the past century. (The brand maintains
that Lilli did not inspire Barbie but merely revealed to
Handler the possibility of manufacturing an 11-inch doll.)
Bild Lilli was a single-panel comic character in a German
tabloid—a sweet, ditzy, curvy figment of the male imagina-
tion, frequently losing her clothes and enjoying the com-
pany of men. Each punch line hinged on Bild Lilli’s hotness,
her horniness, or her lack of common sense. When a police
officer informed Bild Lilli that the two-piece swimsuit she
was wearing was in violation of decency laws, she responded
earnestly, “Which piece do you want me to take off?” The
original Barbie seemed to share Bild Lilli’s makeup and her
alien proportions, which Handler was supposedly attracted
to exactly for their dissimilitude to real human features, per
the Hulu documentary Tiny Shoulders. This doll, with her
triangular boobs and elliptical head, was like nothing they
had seen before. “The original doll appealed to girls
because she was terrifying,” says M.G. Lord, the author of
Forever Barbie and a pop culture scholar. “She did look like
a space alien.”
Prior to Bild Lilli and Barbie, the doll market was limited to
three-dimensional babies and two-dimensional paper fash-
ion dolls. Handler made Barbie a woman—something to
dress up, but also something to look forward to.
McKnight, the head of the Barbie brand, believes that this
strain of make-believe is at the core of the success of doll
play. “The doll is a great catalyst for storytelling, creative
expression, and imagination,” she tells me, more or less
restating the PROMISE poster behind her. Children imagine
themselves as grown-ups; they see themselves in Barbie.
Sometimes this is not a great thing to do. Barbie’s critics
say she is not a desirable role model, given her looks and her
hyperfeminine, pink-washed worldview. But what else is out
there? Other dolls have tried and failed to fill the swirlingIt