Loved and loathed, Barbie's history isn't all bright pink
Despite a complicated past, Barbie has maintained cultural relevance since her inception in 1959
In her 64 years of existence, Barbie has had hundreds of careers, including as an astronaut and running to be U.S. president. But her story isn't all bright pink.
The doll has also been the focal point for countless debates around feminism and body image. Despite these controversies, some experts say Barbie is as culturally relevant today as she was at her inception.
Risqué beginnings
Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler invented the doll in 1959.
During a family vacation in Europe, Handler reportedly saw a German Lilli doll — a popular post-war comic strip character that appeared in the German tabloid Bild, — and used it as the inspiration for Barbie.
Bild Lilli was extremely popular, especially among men, said Maria Teresa Hart, the author of Doll, a non-fiction pop-culture feminist critique of dolls, doll history and doll culture.
"She was using her body and was using everything that she could at her disposal," Hart said. "She was funny and flirtatious and, yes, she was written with the male gaze in mind."
The American doll debuted on March 9, 1959, at the New York International Toy Fair, as Barbie, Teenage Fashion Model, sporting a blond ponytail and a portfolio of fashion sketches.
Janice Rudkowski, an assistant professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, worked with Mattel Canada as a senior marketing manager. She and Hart were both quick to point out that while Barbie may have been crafted with the male gaze in mind, she was still very progressive for the time.
"This doll that was designed was a single, independent woman. This is 1959, and if you look at the very first house, Barbie Dream House … it kind of looks like a bachelor pad. She clearly has gone to college because there's these college banners on the walls. That is not a stereotypical 1950s or 1960s woman," Rudkowski said.
A staple of the zeitgeist
In the decades since, Barbie and her possessions have always "reflected and shaped the marketplace," according to M.G. Lord, the author of Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll and co-host of the podcast L.A. Made: The Barbie Tapes.
But Mattel's attempts to keep up with cultural trends weren't always perfect and Barbie often had detractors.
In 1972, the National Organization for Women protested Barbie at the annual New York toy fair, criticizing fashion dolls like Barbie for perpetuating "sexual stereotypes by encouraging little girls to see themselves solely as mannequins, sex objects or housekeepers."
During the civil rights movement, Mattel created a Black friend for Barbie named Christie — but a titular Black Barbie didn't come until decades later.
"Barbie was initially a skinny white girl, and they didn't introduce the titular Barbie character as Black Barbie until 1980," said Hart.
The 1980s also led to another iteration of Barbie, as more women continued to enter the workforce.
Donning a pink suit and a briefcase, Day-to-Night Barbie went to work, too. The doll was also given a new promotional slogan: "We girls can do anything."
It's the closest Mattel has come to explicitly identifying Barbie as a feminist — a word that was "stigmatized" in corporate America — said Lord, who is also an associate professor at the University of Southern California (USC).
Barbie's extremely thin body has frequently faced criticism, too, for upholding an unrealistic beauty standard.
As intersectionality and body positivity became more mainstream ideas, Mattel made changes to the doll in 2016, adding millimetres of width to her thighs and waist, reducing her breasts and creating more racially diverse dolls.
While Rudkowski understands the criticism of Barbie's body, she said it's one that's all too familiar.
"Criticizing her body is the exact same criticism that human women get all the time," she said. "Not only do human women get criticized for every aspect of their body, but this doll is getting criticized for every aspect of her body."
"Did we ever criticize Spiderman? A human man can't do what Spiderman does.… Those criticisms, to me, are very reflective of what's happening in society," Rudkowski said.
Research from a 2006 article in the journal Developmental Psychology found that young girls aged five to eight that were exposed to images of Barbie dolls reported lower body esteem and greater desire for a thinner body shape than girls exposed to images of a larger doll.
These examples of an evolving, changing Barbie doll are part of an approach that has kept her relevant all these years, says Sameer Hosany, a professor of marketing at the Royal University of London in the U.K.
"One of the main, key strategies that they've done is this sense of constantly reinventing themselves," he said.
Barbie has stayed popular. Over the last decade, Barbie's total brand revenue has hovered around $1 billion US, according to Statista. And 2021 marked the highest net-sales value for the brand since 2013, with revenue hitting $1.7 billion US worldwide.
Main character energy
Of course, where there's Barbie, there's (sometimes) Ken.
Ken first arrived a few years after Barbie's inception, in 1961. But as we've come to learn, it's really all about Barbie.
"Whether she's rocking out, or surfing, or whatever, she will find the Ken that corresponds to her. But also if she doesn't, it's kind of, 'Who cares?' because Ken is this add-on," said Hart.
Because of her ability to be tailored to audiences and trends, over the years, Barbie has had some special connections to Canada, too.
As part of the brand's "Dolls of the World" program, which featured dozens of globally inspired designs from all continents, Barbie donned the red serge and Stetson of an RCMP officer. Mattel also released the "Inuk" Inuit Northern Canada Barbie in 1997 under the program.
And Barbie was a Toronto Raptors fan long before the team won the NBA championship in 2019, when a special 1998 version of the doll featured an authentic purple uniform.
During her time at Mattel, Rudkowski launched a contest that led to the creation of "Inuit Legend" Barbie.
The doll's original design was created by an Indigenous university fashion student named Christy Marcus, who had Inuit and Cree background.
"She used her own Indigenous heritage as her inspiration for the design … there were so many beautiful designs," said Rudkowski.
"That's what's so interesting about the brand is that the possibilities are endless," added Rudkowski.
Where does that leave us?
The bottom line, according to experts, is that Barbie has a complicated legacy.
"We can actually hold two truths at the same time. We can celebrate the things that we love about her. And then we can also still remember and not have amnesia about some of the kind of problematic things in her past," said Hart.
"So much of how people feel about Barbie depends on who's talking," said Lord. "Barbie is a Rorschach test. People project whatever they want to project onto her little hunk of plastic body."
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