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She came to be seen, by many commentators but also by many parents, as not only quaintly antiquated, but also potentially damaging. (That waist! Those hips! Those perma-heeled feet!)Īnd as the women’s movement arose-as feminism dissolved, quickly, into the culture at large-Barbie came to symbolize a tension between empowerment and subjugation. She represented the awkward disconnect between cultural expectation and physical reality. Barbie represented, from the outset, the freight of femininity. Ruth Handler may have designed the doll, in the 1950s, to be a progressive alternative to the baby doll, thereby expanding girls’ vision of what their roles might be what she also designed, however, was an impossible standard that would endure for generations.
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In that sense, Barbie-as a cultural symbol, and as a commercial product-had to change. Under their influence, and under the influence of a culture that so often equates progress with prestige, “traditional” beauty ideals have become boring beauty ideals. White women may be prominent in advertising and television and movies, but so, increasingly, are women like Lupita N’yongo and Gina Rodriguez and Maggie Q. Waifs may still be prominent on catwalks and red carpets, but so are curvaceous women like Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian and Christina Hendricks and Amy Schumer. Via broad demographic changes, and also via the various serendipities of celebrity, Hollywood and the media have been expanding their sense of the “ideal” feminine form. Also, though, the dive has to do with shifts taking place in the culture at large. (They dropped 20 percent between 20, Dockterman reports, and continued their slide last year.) This is in part because Disney recently awarded its Princess business to Hasbro, taking that merchandise away from Mattel during The Age of Elsa. It went like this: Mattel’s sales of its Barbie dolls have, recently, been plummeting. This was that oldest and most American of things: cultural change by way of capitalism. The changes in Barbie’s body may have arisen out of the company’s desire to do good mostly, though, they arose from its need to do well. It did so instead as part of a cynical business calculation-the kind of cynical business calculation any good company is expected to make on behalf of itself and its shareholders. Mattel did not make those changes, necessarily, because it wanted to be a moral leader, Time ’s Eliana Dockterman notes. It required, even, the creation of new shoes that would accommodate wider feet. It required Mattel to create whole new sets of clothes to accommodate the dolls’ body shapes. To transform Barbie ’s body-to expand its offerings to include shapes and shades that more closely resemble the storied “Average American Woman ”-was, after all, a large logistical challenge for the company. And good news! But the best news of all might just be the specific reasons Mattel has offered for the changes. And a better job, at the same time, of affecting who those people will become. She is, in her highly limited way, trying to do a better job of representing the people who play with her. Which is to say that Barbie-that singular figure who has always carried pretensions toward broader cultural representation-is becoming, finally, more diverse.
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(And also: a variety of hairstyles, and eye colors, and “face sculpts.”) The doll will still be fairly cartoonish-this is Barbie, after all-but, from today, she can be bought in sizes “petite” and “tall” and “curvy.” (The terms, Time notes-the English euphemisms, as well as their translations into other languages-were extensively debated by Mattel marketing executives.) She can also, just as importantly, be bought in seven different skin tones. Barbie, the doll that the Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler modeled after Lilli and introduced at the World’s Fair in 1959, will now come in a variety of shapes and shades. It’s that impulse of small humans-to treat dolls as vehicles not just of amusement, but of aspiration-that makes today’s news such a big deal. Let the Record Show Is an Essential Story of the AIDS Movement Dagmawi Woubshet