The Real History of Barbie (#165)

According to the Barbie website, this is the story of Barbie:

Barbie was founded in 1959 by Ruth Handler (above, left), a mother and visionary entrepreneur, whose inspiration for Barbie came from watching her daughter project her dreams and aspirations onto paper dolls.

Recognizing a gap in the market, which only offered baby dolls for girls to imagine themselves as caregivers, Ruth invented the fashion doll category with a three-dimensional doll that girls could use to imagine their future selves. 

Ruth’s philosophy behind Barbie was that through the doll a little girl could be anything she wanted to be and that she has choices.

Over the brand’s 60 years, Barbie has empowered girls to imagine themselves in aspirational roles from a princess to president.

But there’s a lot more to the story. In this episode, we’re going to learn about the history of Barbie — her invention, the growth of the brand, and some of the controversies along the way.

Barbie was the brainchild of Ruth Handler, who was actually the co-founder, along with her husband Eliot, of Mattel in 1945. When Handler noticed her daughter Barbara moved on from playing with baby dolls and started playing with paper fashion dolls of adult women, she noticed an unfilled niche in the market. She decided she wanted to give her a real doll that wasn’t a baby, but a woman she could aspire to.

So, in March 1959, a doll named “Barbie”, full name Barbara Millicent Roberts, launched onto the American toy market, sporting a black-and-white striped bathing suit, pouty red lips and a blonde ponytail. Handler always saw Barbie as a reflection of the times, with the first doll mimicking the glamour of 1950s stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. The new 11-inch plastic doll was the first mass-produced toy doll in the US with adult features.

One origin story of Barbie’s appearance is that it was modelled after a doll named the Bild Lilli, which had been inspired by a German comic-strip character. Lilli dolls were originally marketed as a racy joke gift that men could buy in tobacco shops, bars and adult-themed toy stores, and given at bachelor parties, put on car dashboards, dangled from the rearview mirror, or given to girlfriends as a suggestive keepsake. Nevertheless, Lilli dolls soon became extremely popular with children as well as adults. They caught the eye of Ruth Handler’s daughter Barbara, who was 15 at the time. Soon, Mattel bought the rights to Lilli, and Handler created her own version, which she named Barbie, after her daughter.

Barbie premiered at the annual Toy Fair in New York in March 1959, and in the first year, 300,000 Barbie dolls were sold.

Barbie’s on-and-off long-term boyfriend Ken, full name Ken Carson, was introduced two years after Barbie in 1961. Ken was named after Ruth Handler’s son.

By this point, Barbie was already being criticised as a sex symbol, so Mattel decided to give her a best friend and a sister, maybe as a way to humanise her—I’m not sure. Her little sister was Skipper Roberts, originally sold as a child and later as a teenager, and her best friend was Midge Hadley. Fashioned as a ‘homelier’ friend for Barbie with red hair and freckles, Midge was discontinued after 1967, returning in the 1980s along with a husband, kids and a ‘Happy Family’ line of toys, which even included Pregnant Midge.

The line courted scandal from every angle, including outrage that Midge was pregnant without a wedding ring. She had more controversy when Mattel released another pregnant version of the doll with a magnetic baby that could be removed from her womb, because some parents felt it was inappropriate for a children's toy.

In 1967, supermodel Twiggy became the first celebrity to have a Barbie made in her likeness. Cher, Audrey Hepburn and Diana Ross, to name a few, would later join the ranks of celebrity Barbies.

One thing that had always been controversial about Barbie dolls was their body image. The doll was created as a stark contrast to baby dolls that were already popular. Handler told the New York Times, "If [a young girl] was going to do role playing of what she would be like when she was 16 or 17, it was a little stupid to play with a doll that had a flat chest. So I gave it beautiful breasts.”

But people have always been aware of Barbie’s unrealistic proportions: her impossibly nipped-in waist, generous boobs and thin legs which would never be able to support Barbie’s frame in reality. A 1963 Barbie came complete with a diet book that simply read ‘Don’t eat’. In 2006, a study published in the journal of Developmental Psychology concluded that girls exposed to Barbie at a young age were more vocal about being thin, compared with those exposed to other dolls. A 2014 survey showed that Barbie haters considered the dolls to be ‘out of touch,’ ‘materialistic’ and ‘not diverse’. In response to this, in 2016, three new Barbie body shapes were introduced: petite, tall and curvy.

Linked to this, Barbie has also been a controversial figure among the feminist movement, which took on a whole new momentum in the 1960s and 70s. People stated that Barbie was an anti-feminist role model. Barbie had become a shorthand for bimbo. At a 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality march in New York, the chant became “I am not a Barbie doll”.

However, Barbie has always been a working woman, having all sorts of careers from the year of her creation. Over the span of her existence, Barbie has had more than 250 careers, including astronaut (she went to the moon in 1965, four years before Neil Armstrong), doctor, palaeontologist, rock star, robotics engineer, video game developer, pilot, firefighter, journalist, and entrepreneur, just to make a few. In 1992, Barbie ran for president for the first time and they have created a new doll for almost every election year since. In 2016, she also had a female vice president.

In her 1994 memoir, Ruth Handler said: “My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be. Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices.”

Over time, lots of different Barbies have been designed by various artists, and the era of collectable Barbies was born. There have been all sorts of limited edition and special Barbie dolls created, from a drag queen Barbie called the Blonds Blond Diamond Barbie, to Ella the chemotherapy Barbie, which had no hair and was distributed directly to hospitals.

As well as starting a craze of limited, collectable dolls, this was also a turning point for diversity in the brand. Until this point, diversity wasn’t a huge thing—there was an African American doll, Barbie’s friend Christie, who was first introduced in 1968, but an official African American Barbie wasn’t created until 1980, alongside a Latina Barbie. That same year saw the first of more than 40 different international Barbies released to date.

In 1997, the company debuted "Share a Smile Becky," the first fashion doll to come with a wheelchair. In 2016 introduced Barbie Fashionistas, which came in four body types, seven skin tones, 22 eye colours and 24 hairstyles. Then in 2018, Mattel released a new “Inspiring Women” collection that featured three groundbreaking women of history: Amelia Earhart, Frida Kahlo and Katherine Johnson.

In 2019, with the marking of Barbie's 60th anniversary, Mattel released a new Barbie body type that featured a smaller bust, less defined waist and more defined arms. The addition was just the latest in Barbie's expanded line featuring a wider array of body shapes.

So what is Barbie worth today? The first Barbie doll sold for $3, but a mint condition #1 doll can fetch more than $25,000 today. By Barbie's 50th birthday in 2009, over 1 billion Barbie dolls had been sold by Mattel. Even today, every three seconds, a Barbie doll is sold somewhere in the world, and more than 100 dolls are sold every minute in 150 countries worldwide. A Barbie Dreamhouse, first introduced in 1962, is sold every two minutes. Barbie has products in over 50 categories, including food, fitness, and clothing.

In terms of more contemporary media, the Barbie YouTube channel has over twenty million global subscribers and 23 billion minutes of content watched. Barbie apps average more than 7 million monthly active users, and Barbie has a powerful social media presence with over 19 millions followers across platforms.

And with the new film, Barbie is taking the world by storm once again. The film has topped $1 billion in global ticket sales, and could also have a lasting financial impact on companies spanning fashion, entertainment, and home decor. It has had an unprecedented marketing campaign, working with industries from fashion and beauty to homeware and tech. And more importantly, I think it’s bringing back the idea that Ruth Handler had in the first place: it’s bringing Barbie back to being an aspirational figure, with the film showing her with real, human flaws, and including America Farerra’s now-famous monologue about women’s standards.