At 63 years old, Barbiethe most famous, slender and billionaire doll in history, you should be thinking about your retirement. But nothing further from that. Continue with a packed agenda. Mattelthe toy company that it launched on the market on March 9, 1959, and that since then has made it venture into 200 different professionshas just launched its latest model, commemorating 70 years on the throne of Elizabeth II, the infinite queen who has just turned 96, and has her jump to the movies. Not the animated one, where it has several titles, but the flesh and blood one, since production is already underway on the film that Warner Bros. will release in the summer of 2013 with Margot Robbie at the controls of the unmistakable bubblegum pink convertible.
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Several generations of girls and boys have played with Barbie, a toy that, despite its worldwide fame, is also has been the subject of numerous lawsuits and controversiessuch as on the woman’s role which represented the original doll and its measurements. Hence, in the last decade Barbie has tried adapt to the timesincorporating new bodies, countless skin colors and also hairstyles.
Here’s a review of the most curious facts in its history 👇
Inspired by a prostitute
Ruth Handler imagined Barbie for a trip to Germany. She was inspired by a curvaceous woman who slept with men for money and who appeared in a comic strip from the German newspaper ‘Bild Zeitung’, a ‘call-girl’ thought “to encourage” men after the Second World War. The Mattel’s goal was to turn “a plastic German whore into a standard American middle-class girl,” explains the documentary ‘The toys that made us’ (Netflix).
Then the Denver businesswoman gave her toy a much more epic speech: “In creating Barbie, my philosophy was that, through the doll, girls could become everything they wanted.”
barbie doll owes its name to Ruth Handler’s daughter, who was called Bárbara and who enjoyed playing with paper dolls and giving them adult roles. Then, the Mattel team (a company based in California), made him a custom biography. Barbie hails from Willows, a fictional town located in the state of Wisconsin where he attended Willows High School. barbie’s boyfriend, Ken Carson (a doll that appeared later, in 1961), is also inspired by another of the children of the Handler couple. However, the doll’s full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts. This is how it was launched at the American International Toy Fair held in New York on March 9, 1959. That is his birthday.
The doll four years ahead of Neil Armstrong. In 1965, the astronaut Barbie who traveled to the Moon was marketed, a move by Mattel. However, they had to go 57 years and 10 different models of the space doll so that Barbie could literally travel to space. On February 19, 2022, two dolls took off from Wallops Island (Virginia, USA) on Northrop Grumman’s commercial resupply services mission with its ‘Cygnus’ spacecraft. The crew members were able photograph and record the plastic models gravitating in different rooms of the International Space Station, with impressive views to the Earth. An action by Mattel to promote careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics
Controversial measures (and character)
In the 70s Barbie began to be criticized for its materialism, since he used to accumulate cars, luxury cars, mansions (in Malibu) and industrial quantities of clothes (by the way, the first accessories came from Japan, where clothes, bags and hats were sewn by hand). Have also been very controversial its impossible measures (which in a real woman would be 91-46-84), since it could induce girls to imitate her and suffer from anorexia. In 1994, an investigation of the Central University Hospital of Helsinki (Finland), observed that the doll would lack the percentage of body fat necessary – from 17% to 22% – for a woman to menstruate. The doll with more realistic measurements was launched in the year 2000.
Barbie loves to drive her convertible and she also loves animals. Her first pet was a horse, which was called ‘Dancer’. But throughout his long life he has had 21 dogs, 6 cats, a panda, a giraffe, a lion, a zebra, a parrot or a chimpanzee, among others…
Barbie has inspired works of artlike the portrait Andy Warhol he did in 1986 to his friend Billy Boy. He also appears in photographs of William Wegman and David Levinthal. Additionally, writers such as AM Homes and Barbara Kingsolver have used the doll in their novels. It also has its version in the world of music, since in 1997 the Norwegian-Danish band Aqua dedicated a song to her (‘barbie girls‘) that swept the world.
For all these reasons, Barbie is a collector’s item very popular, especially the older copies or special editions, which fetch thousands of dollars at auction. The most expensive in the world sold in 2010 for $ 302,000. Her diamond necklace was the work of Australian jeweler Stefano Canturi.
It is not only the most famous doll, it is also the most sold. It is estimated that more than one billion Barbie dolls have been sold worldwide, in more than 150 countries. Mattel claims three Barbie dolls are sold every second. The best-selling version was ‘Babie Totally Hair’with a long mane that allows him to do numerous hairstyles.
Due to its relevance the doll was given its own international day, March 9just one day after Women’s Day.
Barbie has a very extensive curriculum since has worked in almost 200 different professions. Not only has she been an astronaut, she is also a chef, a doctor, an Olympic athlete, a candidate for the US elections… and even a McDonald’s receptionist worker.
Despite all these uniforms, the doll had problems for their dress in Saudi Arabia, in 1995. The country suspended its sale because it violated the Islamic dress code. Over time Mattel has released Barbies with hijabs.
In 2019, the Barbie was recognized as fashion icon by the Council of Fashion Designers of America. In this way, his influence was rewarded both in commercial fashion and in haute couture, since the doll They have dressed her from Vera Wang to Oscar de la Renta. During the spring-summer 2015 fashion week in Milan, the designer from Kansas Jeremy Scottwho had signed two years earlier for Moschinopresented the collection with which he put the public in his pocket: a tribute to American pop culture to the greater glory of one of its great icons, Barbie.
The last to have her own Barbie has been, at 96 years old, the Queen of England. But the list of celebrities is very long. The princess eleanor and his mother, LetiziaThey also have a plastic version. And, to cite just a few examples, Barbies have also been made of actresses, such as liz taylor; singers, like madonna, cher, Shakira either Jennifer Lopez; ‘top models’, like claudia schiffer, Heidi klum either Gigi Hadidand artists, such as the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Even the editor of ‘Vogue’, Anna Wintouralso has its own model, like the presenter Cristina Pedrochedressed in one of her year-end models.