Barbie Land

On Sunday, my older daughter and I went to see Barbie, which, in case you’re not into pop culture, is a movie by director Greta Gerwig about the iconic fashion doll’s existential identity crisis when she confronts the “real” world. Starring Margot Robbie as Stereotypical Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken, the film opens with an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and romps off from there. It’s a hoot. We had a great time.

There’s been a host of critics who’ve reviewed the summer blockbuster, predictably commenting from either side of our culture divide about Gerwig’s feminist message. But I’m not going to get into that here. What I want to write about is one of the underlying notions of the film, that Barbie has been an aspirational toy for young girls since the ’60s, with all kinds of Barbies cast as everything from astronauts (1965, way ahead of NASA) to astrophysicists. Apparently toy-maker Mattel has created more than 200 jobs for Barbie, including U.S. President.

Years ago, when my sister and I played with her Barbies and my Ken doll, that phase of Barbie Land did not yet exist. This was in the early ’60s. We created doll rooms in the bottom three shelves of a bookcase that our dad had built years prior, originally to store his huge LP record collection. The furniture didn’t fit the dolls’ proportions, but we didn’t care much. We were more interested in the family intrigue that my sister would narrate, particularly the conflicts between ponytail Barbie (one of the originals, and yes, she came dressed in that black-and-white strapless bathing suit and sunglasses) and bubble-cut Barbie (bouffant blonde hair), whom my sister named Alice and deemed Barbie’s evil twin.

I could not keep up with my sister’s plots and offer my own. She was an avid reader and two years older, and she came up with all kinds of story lines that were beyond me. I don’t recall much else, other than I preferred to change Ken’s outfits (already, I loved fashion) more than figure out what was going to happen next.

And the clothes were fabulous. Back then, they were made from beautiful fabrics, satin and wool and cotton, with tiny working metal zippers and miniature buttons. No synthetics. Real pleats in Barbie’s tennis skirt and satin stripes on Ken’s tuxedo.

My Ken was not one of those dolls with the plastic molded blonde hair. No, he had brown flocked hair, which unfortunately rubbed off when I struggled to put on his red football pads under his red-and-white football jersey. So I occasionally would repair his bald spots with a burnt sienna Crayola crayon, which seemed to do the trick.

Eventually, I got Skipper (Barbie’s little sister), and she was fun to play with, but Ken was always my favorite. My sister got Midge (Barbie’s best friend), but unlike the later version of that Mattel doll, who apparently was supposed to be pregnant, this Midge had the same voluptuous figure as Barbie, reddish brown hair with bangs, and freckles.

Our dolls could not move their knees or elbows. They could wave their arms up and down and do splits, but when they sat, their legs went straight out. Often, they’d fall to one side, seated.

It didn’t matter. I enjoyed the clothes, and my sister made up dramatic, entertaining stories that had nothing to do with Barbie’s careers. And when the time came to move on from Barbie Land, we packed each doll and outfit into individual plastic bags and stored them carefully. I inherited the collection, with my sister’s blessing. Our daughters—especially our younger daughter—enjoyed playing with them. And now they are stored in a large plastic box under a bed. I’ve been wondering if it’s time to sell them, given the Barbie craze. But I’m not sure if I’m ready to let them go.

P.S: Just a note, if you’ve read this far (thank you!), that I’ll be taking a break for the next three weeks. Enjoy the rest of August and see you in September.

Image: “Barbie’s first clothing designer Charlotte Johnson posing with 1965 Barbie doll model,” by Nelson Tiffany, May 13, 1964, UCLA Libary Digital Collections.

Evelyn Herwitz blogs weekly about living fully with chronic disease, the inside of baseballs, turtles and frogs, J.S. Bach, the meaning of life and whatever else she happens to be thinking about at livingwithscleroderma.com. Please view Privacy Policy here.