It’s true that dolls aren’t real, but why are we so invested
in them looking and acting like us? Why would we even want
a role model that has such a tenuous basis in reality?
One fifth of my Mattel entourage, a cheerful blonde
publicist, suggests we leave the conference room and
move on to the next portion of the tour: the enormous
workshop where Barbies are imagined and forged; the fac-
tory where the imaginations of children are smelt into plas-
tic. It’s not open to the public, and you have to take a
shuttle bus to get there.
Before Barbie crosses the threshold of an American
household, before she is assembled by a team overseas, and
right after she is a glint in a brand designer’s (human) eye,
she is assembled by artisans as a prototype, at the Handler
Team Center, in the shadow of LAX.
Every facial feature, from lipstick to iris, is painted on a
plastic head using a barb-thin and whisper-soft brush. Her
hair is then rooted into the scalp at the hands of an enor-
mous metal sewing machine, its needle gnashing atop
Barbie’s smiling face, threading, in this case, a gorgeous
head of curls into the hairline. The strands pull from a ream
of plastic shrink-wrap, the same material that’s used in Saran
Wrap. (In manufacturing, this process is automated on an
unimaginable scale.)
The curls represent a diversity push for Mattel that came
about in better-late-than-never 2016, when the brand
unveiled what designers referred to internally as Project
Dawn, which multiplied Barbie kaleidoscopically into vast
combinations of height (tall, petite, original), body type
(curvy, original), facial features, and hair types (the brand
had begun to embrace a range of skin tones a year earlier).
Though Mattel says this was all part of reimagining the brand
with “no limitations,” the project could also possibly be
linked to decades of critical warfare between Mattel and the
general public, waged over original Barbie’s tiny waist.
Much ado was made about the body types, which gar-
nered mixed to positive feedback, but fewer people focused
on the other changes. The physiognomy, for example, which
diversified Barbie’s Anglo-Saxon features across a more
global racial spectrum, with new eye, nose, and lip shapes.
Or the different hair textures. Recently, the brand discovered
a kind of material that replicates the tight coil pattern found
in certain types of African-American hair. There’s also a velour
that, when applied to Barbie’s scalp, looks like a buzz cut.
When Barbie debuted, she was only available as a binary
blonde or brunette. But the Barbie most of us are familiar
with didn’t debut until 1971, when Mattel dyed her hair the
color of a California sunset beaming through a glass of
Chardonnay—a buttery yellow. This was when Mattel com-
mitted to Barbie as blonde, and Malibu Barbie was born.
It was also the genesis of the image Barbie’s name
conjures: blonde, blue eyes, smile with a touch of teeth,
eyes staring straight ahead. The original Barbie’s eyes were
downcast and to the side, as was the case in 19th-century
erotic nudes. The Malibu Barbie, however, “looked straight
ahead,” says Lord. “Like Manet’s Olympia, she did not avert
her eyes in shame. Malibu Barbie was brazen.”
Lord hypothesizes this was a response to the era’s sexual
revolution, the content of which might be lost on the three-
to-five-year-old demographic in the palm of Barbie’s hand,
but not on their mothers and toy designers. Helen Gurley
Brown was editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, teaching women
that sexual desire was innate and acceptable. The Boston
Women’s Health Book Collective published Our Bodies,
Ourselves, a seminal text on the sexual health of women, the
same year Barbie began looking forward.
And then there was the makeup evolution. The “clas-
sic” Barbie that people think of often had overdrawn eyes,
eye shadow, and lipstick. “The Dynasty days are very dif-
ferent than the Glossier days,” when makeup serves to
accentuate existing features, not shellac them, says
Culmone. Today’s Barbie can be found wearing lighter
makeup and looser hair.
The publicist cheerily decides it’s time to move on to a
studio unofficially known as the 3-D sculpting room, where
the dreams of children are rendered tangible. “A cool room
to walk through,” she says, leading me down a hall, her pen-
dulous blonde hair swinging whenever she turns to address
me. I am warned it is also “terrifying.” But how terrifying
could a Barbie workshop be?As it turns out, quite terrifying. Spooky, bony black trees
(remnants of old Halloween decorations) make it seem as
though you are walking into a deadened forest. And
because much of Barbie’s shapely body is digitally created
(before multiplying into armies of shapely bodies), most of
the non-office furnishings are disembodied doll heads.
Some are tests from across Mattel’s brands that never
made it to production, which adds a layer of pathos to this
particular room, which is also very dark.
This unlit cave of horrors is, unfortunately, home to my
favorite part of the Handler Team Center tour: a display
case that includes unproduced celebrity Likeness dolls.
As part of the brand’s commitment to providing young
girls with bite-size role models, Mattel has supplanted
Barbie’s fictional posse with dolls that are more or less based
on real people, with varying accuracy. Gigi Hadid’s Likeness
doll, for example, looks nearly identical to the model. Frida
Kahlo’s Likeness doll, though, looks like Frida Kahlo if Frida
Kahlo had the nose and toothpick proportions of Gigi Hadid.
I ask a designer if the Likeness dolls are supposed to look like
the person, or like Barbie, and he confirms that, well, no, nei-
ther. “This is a Barbie doll representing Frida Kahlo,” explains
Robert Best, a senior product designer for the brand. “It’s a
costume, if you will.” Frida Kahlo Barbie is no more Frida
Kahlo than a Vegas Cher impersonator is Cher.
In certain cases, says Best, the doll will make it all the
way to a full sculpt—a final draft of a doll—before the
designers find out whether or not they’ll be able to prduce
it on a larger scale. “So then it languishes here in develop-
ment, never being seen by the public.” He points to a
near-perfect replica of a public figure I am not at liberty to
describe, who beams back at us.
The Barbieverse distinguishes between two Barbies.
There’s Barbie “the icon,” or “brand,” who can be blonde and
short or black and svelte or Frida Kahlo and white. There’s
Barbie “the character,” who is exactly who you’re thinking of,
and will be played by Margot Robbie in an upcoming film.
Then there are the Likeness dolls, including Olympic fencer
Ibtihaj Muhammad and Hadid, who are added voices to the
Barbie universe, her friends, and she-roes.
Several times throughout the tour I am assured that
Barbie is apolitical, which isn’t entirely true—in 2017, a
photo posted to @barbiestyle’s Instagram featured her and
a doll version of influencer Aimee Song wearing “Love
Wins” T-shirts, indicating that Barbie supports same-sex