The Often Wacky, Sometimes Wicked, and Always Wondrous Eras of Barbie
The Mattel doll has been through a lot since her 1959 creation—a rise to fame, a public backlash, a breakup, a reconciliation, and much more. Now, though, we’ve entered her latest era—Blockbuster Barbie—which shows that somehow, both the doll and perceptions of her are still evolving.
“This is the best day ever,” says Barbie to Barbie in Barbie, the bubblegum blockbuster out in theaters Thursday. “And so was yesterday, and so is tomorrow.” The living is easy when you’re a doll in a dream house, each day perfectly the same: wake up, greet your friends, cruise the strip in a convertible, smile wide. Do it enough, and you could even become president. But in the movie, which stars Margot Robbie and was directed by Greta Gerwig, Barbie realizes that something is amiss in the universe when all those best days ever stop blending together and something highly foreign to her—change, irrepressible change—starts to creep in.
Out here in the real world, of course—the real real world, not the Real World depicted within the confines of the Barbie movie—change is a constant, and uncertainty is a business opportunity. Just ask the folks at Mattel.
The Original Teenage Fashion Model Barbie Doll was introduced to Americans in 1959, and since then Barbie has crossed oceans and built fortunes and become shorthand—though exactly what the doll is shorthand for has long been up for debate. Imaginative play or unattainable perfection? Dowdy toy or Nicki Minaj’s alter ego? “We girls can do anything!” proclaimed a 1985 Barbie brand campaign, and it’s true. Barbie can do everything and be anything—and she has, in ways both cherished and absurd, for her whole lifetime.
So here—with thanks to the pop star who has been called a Barbie by both Margot Robbie (in an admiring way) and Camille Paglia (the opposite)—is a dash through the many eras of Barbie’s, and Barbie’s, existence. They weren’t always the best days ever, but it would have felt wrong if they were.
The Beginning: The Bored Teens and Hornt-Up Germans Era
As the story goes, Ruth Handler, a mom and toyco entrepreneur who owned Mattel with her husband back in postwar Southern California, was watching their young teen daughter play with paper dolls when she realized there was a big-haired, slim-waisted, well-dressed hole in the doll economy. At the time, three-dimensional dolls came mainly in two forms: baby or ageless cherub. Ruth’s daughter, Barbara (nicknamed Babs), preferred her paper dolls, which depicted more adult-looking women.
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Thus, an idea was born, and in 1956, while on a family tour of Europe, Handler spotted a doll in a Swiss store window that was exactly the kind of thing she had in mind. That toy—called Lilli—was originally a lascivious icon mined from a suggestive German comic strip and sold as a gag gift, but that didn’t matter to Handler. She saw it as proof of concept and bought a bunch to take back to the States for further research.
In the years that followed, Mattel executives traveled to Japan to look into the latest in molded-plastics technology, and Handler met with a sort of socio-consumerist Svengali named Ernest Dichter to figure out how best to market her new doll—to be named Barbie because Babs was already copyrighted. (Dichter suggested bigger knockers.) In 1959, Handler presented Barbie at the annual Toy Fair in New York, and while the buyers there were unenthusiastic, the market demand wound up being astounding. The rest, as they say, is herstory.
The 1960s: The Mad-Men-Meets-Feminine-Mystique Era
It’s difficult to read about Barbie’s early years without picturing Don and Peggy and Joan. After all, they would have been Ruth Handler’s contemporaries: The Mad Men universe runs from 1960 to 1970, basically the same as Barbie’s first decade. The book Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Doll, by Robin Gerber, contains all sorts of details that you could imagine showing up in a Matthew Weiner screenplay.
Like Dichter’s Freudian marketing babble. Or the fact that Handler ruthlessly screened job applicants herself and deemed most of them to be “NMM”—not Mattel material. (Can’t you just hear that phrase coming out of Joan’s mouth?) Or that one of the people who was Mattel material, Barbie designer Jack Ryan, was an absolute wild child of a man who was once married to Zsa Zsa Gabor and who installed a moat, drawbridge, throne, and lagoon at his Bel-Air estate. (You know Megan Draper partied there.) And every time one of these people thought about how best to appeal to moms, they must have been picturing someone like Betty Draper—who epitomized both the type of woman that Mattel hoped would purchase its products and also the type of woman that the company sought to differentiate Barbie from.
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, famously outlined the malaise of mid-century modern housewives in the Betty Draper mold. Handler could relate: She told the LA Times in 1959 that “if I had to stay home I would be the most dreadful, mixed-up, unhappy woman in the world.” And so Barbie wasn’t made to be a wife or a mother—she was made to be anything you want. (One early version of the toy was a babysitter Barbie.) There was Ken, of course—named after Ruth’s son, Ken, he debuted in 1961 after Mattel received a high volume of letters from children that requested a sweetheart for Barbie—but he was perceived less as a man of the house and more as Barbie’s tagalong simp. The first iteration of the Barbie Dreamhouse, which came out in 1962, was modest—but it was all hers.
Opinions on all this were mixed, as they always are when it comes to Barbie. (“I don’t know if there’s a doll that anyone is as mad at,” Barbie director Greta Gerwig recently told The New Yorker.) A grumpy 1963 piece in The Saturday Evening Post complained that “girls today are spurning the traditional pudgy infant dolls for the very popular new doll which boasts a ripe bosom, long, shapely legs and, of course—for this is the core of the doll’s symbolic value—her own boyfriend doll.” A less uptight story in The New York Times that same year pointed out “the revolutionary idea that little girls today are viewing their girl dolls increasingly as themselves and not as their babies” and raised an eyebrow at “a society where a mother has been heard to remark of her daughter, ‘I wouldn’t mind her being married at 16 nearly as much as I would mind her not being married at 18.’” (Can’t you just see Sally Draper rolling her eyes and going back to making her Barbie dolls kiss?)
But what wasn’t mixed were the sales numbers. As Gerber writes, Mattel earned revenues of $26 million in 1963, making it the world’s largest toy company, and reached $180 million three years later.
The ’70s: The Corporate Shenanigans Era
Barbie’s second decade proved to be a more tumultuous time for her creators. The National Organization for Women listed Mattel as a sexist advertiser. “I am not a Barbie doll!” chanted some marchers at the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality in New York, which was part of the growing women’s liberation movement and included speeches from activists like Gloria Steinem. “I am so grateful I didn’t grow up with Barbie,” Steinem would later recall in a 2018 Barbie documentary called Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie. “Barbie is everything we didn’t want to be and were told to be.” But this kind of mindset wasn’t the only headwind facing Mattel at the time. Dockworkers were striking, and the U.S. economy was about to totally go on the fritz, even if you wouldn’t know it from the carefree vibes of Malibu Barbie, introduced in 1971.
Handler, meanwhile, was dealing with problems of her own. With the thought of expanding her child-centric empire, she initiated a deal in which Mattel would buy Ringling Bros. for $48 million. She also underwent a mastectomy after being diagnosed with cancer and had less bandwidth to devote to the business. The money got tight.
And so the bean counters decided to fudge things: a false invoice here, an inflated number there, tale as old as time. (Mattel’s auditor, the late, not-great Arthur Andersen, didn’t raise any flags; Ruth blamed a newly hired executive named Seymour Rosenberg.) Eventually, the fishy smell became overpowering enough that shareholder lawsuits ensued, accusing Mattel executives of financial malfeasance. Mattel quietly sold Ringling Bros. Ruth was forced to leave the company in 1975. In 1978 she pleaded no contest to charges of false reporting to the SEC and mail fraud and was sentenced to a $57,000 fine and 2,500 hours of community service.
Mattel would recover by the end of the decade (under new leadership). But in the years before it did, The Wall Street Journal reported on a joke that was making the rounds: “Have you heard about Mattel’s new talking doll? Wind it up and it forecasts a 100% increase in sales and profits. Then it falls flat on its face.”
Here’s another: Have you heard about Mattel’s new puberty doll? Twist its arm, and it grows boobs. Then it falls flat on its face. Oh wait, I’m just talking about “Growing Up Skipper,” the strange 1975 release of a version of Barbie’s kid sister who is absolutely pulsating with hormones. Reaction to the doll was what you might imagine, but my problem with it is that they didn’t go far enough—it would have been way realer if Skipper had developed a scorching case of backne and a rude disposition.
The ’80s: The Globalist Era
“She’s black! She’s beautiful! She’s dynamite!” read the copy on the box for the first Black Barbie, who was finally unveiled in 1980. (In 1968, Mattel had released a Black friend of Barbie named Christie.) That same year, Mattel began its “Dolls of the World” line, which would eventually grow to feature 91 different Barbies from around the globe, though not without missteps along the way.
In 1985, Mattel launched a new ad campaign called “We Girls Can Do Anything.” It also introduced one of the greats: Day to Night Barbie, whose dual outfits were the inspiration for two different Margot Robbie press tour lewks. (I do wish the “day” Barbie had sported some great commuter sneakers to go along with those shoulder pads and that briefcase.) In 1986, as a response to Hasbro’s successful Jem and the Holograms doll line, Barbie and the Rockers made their debut, getting Shrinky Dinks and a 1987 TV special and everything. Around that same time, Andy Warhol painted Barbie as an homage to a friend named BillyBoy.
According to Gerber’s book, the attempt to turn Barbie into even more of a global commodity was a success: Gerber writes that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, The New York Times ran a photo of “a little girl climbing over the cement and twisted metal, carrying a Barbie doll.”
The ’90s: The High Drama Era
“Loggers Want Barbie to Play a Different Tune,” read the headline of a 1990 LA Times article about an Oregon-based group of loggers who were unhappy about commercials for something called the “Barbie Children’s Summit”—sort of a United Nations for all of dollkind. The commercials, which pictured children singing, contained the following lyrics: “We can save our world together / We can stop the trees from falling.” In response, the Oregon Lands Coalition cautioned that Mattel’s marketing threatened to “inflame the debates about our forests” and promote the “radical agenda” of environmentalists. But the group also stressed that this wasn’t personal. “Who could be anti-Barbie?” one spokesperson told the Times. “This is not Barbie-bashing.”
This dustup would set the tone for the rest of Barbie’s ’90s. This decade brought us some of Barbie’s very finest: I submit that the Totally Hair Barbie, which was released in 1992 and featured a fabulous Pucci-ish shift dress to go along with long crimped locks, is the GOAT. (Sorry, 1993 Earring Magic Ken.) But this era also featured constant drama, each situation more performative than the last.
In 1992, Mattel released Teen Talk Barbie, a doll programmed to say four phrases picked randomly from a library of 270 lines. The small talk notably did not include a reprise of the 1965 line “Don’t eat!” (originally seen in a Barbie diet book), but it did include things like “Who will you invite to the picnic?” and “I’m studying to be a doctor!” and “My horse is a show jumper!” It also included the infamous “Math class is tough,” which set a whole lot of people off.
The American Association of University Women cited that line in a report about the systemic failures in the ways girls were being taught math. A culture-jamming operation calling itself the Barbie Liberation Organization performed rogue voice box surgeries between Barbie and G.I. Joe, swapping the little speakers inside the toys so that G.I. Joe vented about math being tough while Barbie said things like “Eat lead, Cobra!” In Sandusky, Ohio, a mystery man went around slashing and dismembering Barbies for months; even the FBI got involved.
A 1994 Simpsons episode called “Lisa Vs. Malibu Stacy” lampooned the talking feature, showcasing a doll that says, “Don’t ask me, I’m just a girl.” Speaking of girls, in 1997 a Danish and Norwegian musical group called Aqua released a banger called “Barbie Girl” that angered Mattel so much the company sued. (And lost. The judge noted, “The parties are advised to chill.”)
Not all Barbie-adjacent happenings in the ’90s were funny or frivolous, though. In 1994, Ken Handler died of complications from AIDS, according to Gerber’s book. In 1996, Iranian authorities began denouncing Barbie as a “Trojan horse” that would bring decadent Western values into their increasingly fundamentalist society, a proclamation that culminated in threats to forcibly remove the product from shelves in favor of a set of approved dolls named Sara and Dara. “My daughter prefers Barbies,” one Iranian mom told Reuters years later. “She says Sara and Dara are ugly and fat.”
The 2000s: The End of an Era
While Ruth Handler had not been at Mattel for decades, it still felt like the end of an era when she passed away in 2002. “My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be,” Handler wrote in her memoir, Dream Doll. “Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices.” After Handler left Mattel, her choice was to start something new: a company called Nearly Me that manufactured and sold prosthetic breasts to women who had gone through mastectomies.
In the early part of the aughts, Barbie appeared in a cluster of straight-to-DVD offerings and faced stiff competition from a cheeky new doll lineup called Bratz. With their big eyes and palpable ’tudes, Bratz caught attention at once. “Barbie Sales Sag as Bratz Perk Up,” reported the New York Post. Bratz officially outsold Barbies in the U.K. in 2004. Lawsuits between Mattel and the creator of Bratz, who had worked at Mattel for a time, naturally began. (Some of them involved cross-examinations about pornography.)
Notable Barbie dolls of the aughts included the Alien-esque “Pregnant Midge” of 2002; the 2008 “Black Canary Barbie,” who wore black leather shorts and fishnet stockings that upset British Christians; and the “Totally Stylin’ Tattoo Barbie,” which allowed kids to give Barbie a heart-shaped tattoo that said KEN. (Seeking headlines in 2004, Mattel had Barbie and Ken canonically break up. But they would reunite in 2011.)
If it was the end of one era, though, the aughts also marked a beginning—the start of attempts to reclaim and celebrate Barbie. In 2009, Nicki Minaj started referring to one of her alter egos as Harajuku Barbie. Also in 2009, Mattel announced a partnership with Universal Pictures to develop a Barbie movie, a project that would wind up being stalled, recast, and shuffled around for more than a decade before finally, blessedly getting made.
The 2010s: The Development Hell Era
According to a 2015 Bloomberg Businessweek feature on the lucrative past and future of Disney princess IP, Barbie sales fell 20 percent between 2012 and 2014. The company tried stunts to turn things around, like putting old-school Barbie on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, but by 2015 things had deteriorated further, leading to an ouster of the CEO. In 2016 Mattel successfully introduced a line of Barbies with different body shapes: petite, curvy, and tall.
While the company was struggling, the effort to bring Barbie to the big screen was also flailing. The 2009 collaboration with Universal had been a bust, and Mattel was anxious to emulate the success of a 2014 movie based on the products of toy competitor Lego. So Mattel transferred the Barbie rights to a team at Sony, and a carousel of talent began to spin. At various points, writers like Jenny Bicks of Sex and the City and the quippy Diablo Cody were attached to the project. Amy Schumer and then Anne Hathaway were tapped to play the titular Barbie. But years went by, and eventually Sony’s option expired.
Recently, Cody said she “shit the bed” on the project but added that “they wanted a girl-boss feminist twist on Barbie, and I couldn’t figure it out because that’s not what Barbie is.” And Schumer admitted that her excuse for dropping out—“scheduling conflicts”—wasn’t really the truth. (The truth involved creative differences over Jell-O high heels, obviously.)
It’s hard to translate Barbie to a new medium because, “Math class is tough” excepted, Barbie doesn’t usually speak. She is a tabula rasa, flexibly rigid, smiling and gleaming and blandly nude under all those cool tailored clothes, waiting to be projected upon. Finally, in 2018, Margot Robbie got involved, and she was happy to pick up the doll and start playing. So was Greta Gerwig, who signed on to Barbie in 2019 after having written what she describes as a version of the Apostles’ Creed to win the pitch. Gerwig wouldn’t show the full version to Vogue when recently asked, but one can imagine: I believe in Barbie, the dollmighty …
The Now: The “Hi, Barbie!” Era
“Hi, Barbie!” chirped a lady in Barbie-branded pants and hot pink lipstick in the concessions line before my recent showing of Barbie. I wasn’t sure whether she was talking to me, but before I could think too hard about it, four different people behind me had already replied, “Hi, Barbie!” with gusto. I thought about them all fondly a few minutes into the film. “All these women are Barbie,” intones Barbie’s narrator as the camera pans over a long line of accomplished, confident Barbie Land residents in all shapes and sizes. “And Barbie is all of these women.”
We are Barbie: We are legion. Sure, the doll has been divisive over the last 60-some-odd years, but there was a sense of camaraderie in the theater, a shared excitement from having little idea of what to expect from Gerwig and Robbie’s interpretation of the source material. Barbie is like a cross between Toys and The Truman Show, between Lady Bird and Elf. It has musical numbers and hand-painted skyscapes; it has dueling, catty Kens and one dear, sweet, singular Allan. It is a movie that unlocks all the same chaotic creativity that playing with a Barbie doll always has, resulting in a look that is part pastiche, part wholly, dementedly original. It is self-aware and self-assured. (Just like Ryan Gosling!)
Mattel wants a lot more where this came from. A recent New Yorker article about the company noted that the toy behemoth, which launched its own production company a few years back, has more than a dozen projects in the works based on its intellectual property, like a Daniel Kaluuya film about Barney and a Lena Dunham–led Polly Pocket vehicle. Some of these will never see the light of day; some will be Barbie on the next level; and some will be maximum cringe. Which sounds about right: You can’t always have the best day ever when there are real, live, complicated humans involved. That kind of thing is for the dolls—and it keeps even them on their toes.
