- Thank you Glamnetic for
sponsoring this video. Hello, my darlling dolls. My name is Mina and today
because we're getting closer and closer to the holidays, or I guess for like in the
holiday season right now, I thought it'd be fun to
talk about a children's toy that has deep, deep ties
into the fashion industry. So deep that in 2019, it was the first non-living object that won a CDFA award. Today, we're gonna be talking about, Barbara Millicent Roberts. Steven Kolb, president
and CEO of the CFDA, said in a statement, the
year that she was awarded, "Barbie has had such a wide influence on American fashion and culture. Her story personally resonated with so many CFDA members of the board of directors
decided to honor her with a special tribute. Barbie is one of the only
toys that has continued to stay relevant through
a generations of kids though Furby is making a very weird and surprising come back far. Barbie's also sparked a
number of controversies, including her so-called
materialistic attitude, her disproportionate figure, and the lack of racial
diversity in her models. For this video, I wanna talk
about what transcended her from a toy to cultural icon, the good, and the bad, and why we still
talk about Barbie today. But one first let's take
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last minute gift today. (static crackling) (upbeat music) Fashion dolls have existed
long before Barbie, Max von Boehn found references to dolls across European courts
starting from the 14th century. He writes, "At the time when
the press was non-existent long before the invention of
such mechanical means of reproduction as the
woodcut and copper plate, the doll was given the task of popularizing French fashions abroad. France was exporting fashion
dolls to national fairs and these dolls were even
allowed to cross borders during times of war. But by the late 18th
century, the fashion doll, as they knew her, virtually disappeared, as fashion journals were deemed
to be better styling guides. That's not to say that France stopped making dolls altogether. There was a luxury doll industry in Paris that mainly targeted upper-class girls. It built off the innovations
of Simon-Auguste Brouillet who, at the 1844 industrial exhibition in the Shanz-Ah-lee-zay,
showed dolls that stood alone without stands and that
wore removable clothing. Which was a huge invention because prior to this, French
dolls were actually sewn into their clothes. Removable clothing allowed girls to buy new
outfits for their dolls and dress them however they'd like. Some French dolls of the 19th century include the Adelaide Huret doll, the Bebe Jumeau, and
the Jenny Bereux doll. But by 1900, it was actually
German doll manufacturers that dominated the international market. German dolls were not
really about fashion. They were more like character dolls or dolls that were molded to
have a particular expression. The German doll was a
response to global concern over the French dolls'
passion for fashion. For example, in the 1890s, the Russian Toy Congress
passed a resolution protesting against the large elegant French dolls that taught "love of dress"
and "suggested luxury." So it wasn't until Madame
Beatrice Alexander arrived on the scene that the fashion
doll came back to light in the form of Cissy in 1955. Alexander explains her desire
to make Cissy fashionable by saying, "When I was 11 or 12, I realized that there were poor people, and there were rich people, and I leaned towards the rich. I wanted to have a carriage and a hat with ostrich feathers." The difference between the
French and American dolls were that French dolls
targeted the upper-class whereas American dolls tried to appeal to the rising middle-class
in the post-war era. After Cissy came Ideal's Miss Revlon, who was the most widely
distributed fashion doll in North America at the time, mostly because she was more
reasonably priced than Cissy. Barbie came onto the scene in 1959 and was the creation of Ruth Handler. The reason that Barbie
was so iconic at the time was because if you look
at Cissy and Miss Revlon, they have very babyish faces. Barbie was the first adult
looking children's doll to make a splash in North America. At the time, baby dolls were actually the most
popular toy dolls for girls, which author Sherrie A. Inness, criticizes saying,
"These dolls do not teach about the importance of
travel and adventure. They taught about the
importance of maternity and domesticity. They also conveyed the
completely unrealistic message that babies are all a woman or a girl needs for complete bliss. Lessons Like this can lead many girls to have babies while
still teenagers thinking that children are enough
to fill someone's life with joy." So according to the book, "Barbie and Ruth," Ruth Handler got the idea for a new doll when she noticed that
her daughter, Barbara, who Barbie was named after
enjoy playing with paper dolls, which were these like
paper dolls (chuckling), that had changeable paper clothes. Ruth said an interview years later, "I knew that if only we
could take this play pattern and three-dimensionalize it, we would have something very special." And about the other
fashion dolls of the time, Ruth said, "They were so ugly and clumsy and had child bodies for
grown-up play situations, it just to not go." She got the inspiration she
needed during a family vacation to Switzerland. Ruth and Barbara were
transfixed by a window display of a toy shop that featured
the German hard plastic doll, Bild-Lilli. The Bild-Lilli dolls were
dressed in gorgeous costumes and looks like actual adults with exaggerated hourglass body shapes. The reason why Bild-Lilli looks like this is maybe because she started
her life as a sex toy. More specifically, she was the star of a German adult comic strip
created by Reinhard Beuthien. She was characterized as a "gold digger, exhibitionist, and a floozy." - Good for her. - So it's no surprise
that when Reinhard decided to produce a doll based
on this character in 1955, she was first sold in smoke
shops and adult toy stores and was a popular bachelor party gift. However, young girls
became drawn to Bild-Lilli and so manufacturers cashed in on this by also marketing her to children and producing Bild-Lilli
doll houses, clothes, and furniture separately. Unsurprisingly, when Mattel
released the first Barbie doll that looks like this, some critics condemned
Barbie for being "sleazy and scary" and Sears refused to stalk her. But nevertheless, Barbie persevered because when school let out for the summer sales increased exponentially. Barbie was also originally advertised as a teenage fashion model, which is the justification for
why she had so many clothes. - Of course, Barbie, the famous teenage fashion
model doll by Mattel. May I arrange a showing of her wardrobe? - Oh yeah. - We'd love it. - Charlotte Johnson, the head designer for Barbie fashion even had her team travel seasonally to Europe to watch Paris collections and design the first 21 ensembles inspired by Dior, Balenciaga, Chevelle,
Givenchy, Schiaparelli and et cetera. These early outfits were not mass produced and so careful attention was
paid to the silk linings, the hand-sewn labels, the zippers, and the pearl chokers. Professional stylist
also did Barbie's hair. But despite all these couture outfits, Handler also wanted to
incorporate basic outfits that were representative
of the modern teenager, like a tennis outfit and
a football game outfit. While there is much that we
can criticize about Barbie -and we will get there- It's important to note
that she was groundbreaking for her time, back when
girls were supposed to play with baby dolls and rehearse
their roles as future mothers, Barbie offered them liberation. She hung out with her friends,
went shopping at the mall, never married her boyfriend Ken, became a single homeowner and eventually even became first female president of the
United States in the nineties. I also think it's important to consider that in today's times,
shopping is heavily tied to mass consumerism and the
environmental destruction. But it's also important to recognize that shopping is a radical
part of women's history, starting in the Victorian era. In her book, "Shopping for Pleasure" historian Erika Diane Rappaport writes, "During a period in which
a family's respectability and social position depended upon the idea that the middle-class wife
and daughter remain apart from the market, politics,
and public space, the female shopper was an
especially disruptive figure." And shopping didn't always mean, like, actually buying something. A lot of women would use,
"I'm going shopping," as an excuse to roam around
the city without a male escort or see their friends in a
department store tea room. - And rightfully, so. - Rappaport says about the
criticism towards women shopping at the time, "Perhaps nothing was more
revolting than the spectacle of a middle-class woman immersed
in the filthy fraudulent and dangerous world of
the urban marketplace." So, yes, while I understand the dangers of over-consumption and yada, yada, yada, through today's lens, I think we can also question
these early Barbie critics on whether they were
against the shopping aspect because they didn't
believe it over consumption or because they just didn't
want women to have fun. (upbeat music) So what has led to Barbie's
never ending appeal? And I really mean it's never ending, because despite sales
going down in the mid 2010s and children gravitating
more towards virtual devices, Barbie sales skyrocketed again last year, thanks to the pandemic. Barbie's appeal comes down to two things. The first reason is that
Barbie is constantly changing with the times so that
she appears beautiful and glamorous to each new generation. During the 1960s, for instance, television sets put the public
eye on to a strong family structure via family
sitcoms and advertising. Barbie was thus marketed
alongside new family and friends to align with this ideology. The Barbie books introduced
George and Margaret, her parents, and Mattel added more dolls, a boyfriend named Ken and
a best friend named Midge who represented the girl next door, serving as an equalizer in
Barbie's high-fashion world. Also in the sixties with
mod fashion at its height, Mattel, released the Color Magic Barbie. Barbie was now dressed in
a bright mod style outfit and came with a solution
created by Mattel chemists. A child could add the
solution onto the dress prints to change the fabrics color, or even dab it onto Barbie's
hair for a fresh new do. And when more and more women
were entering the workplace in the 80's, Day-to-Night
Barbie was released. She came with modern office
attire and an evening gown to change into. And her careers expanded from historically women dominated fields like flight attendant
and nurse to everything from Seaworld trainer to astrophysicist. It wasn't until 2016 that Mattel finally added
more inclusive models. They released three new body
shape options: petite, tall, and curvy, 24 different hairstyles, 30 different hair colors, 22 eye colors, 14 face shapes and seven
additional skin tones. They're even making more
and more changes every year and it's clearly been paying off because in the UK in 2019, the most popular Barbie fashionista dolls were the ones that came in wheelchairs. - [Woman] She's just like you, yes, she is. Yeah. - Despite this, I don't wanna give Barbie too much credit because I think they were very, very late on the diversity front. Barbie has been skinny, blonde,
and white for so long that that's unfortunately the
lasting image we have of her, no matter how many curvier or ethnically diverse Barbies come out. Mattel did attempt to introduce a sprinkle of racial diversity
throughout the 20th century with the first Black Barbie in 1968, Black and Hispanic Barbies in 1980, and in 1988, they
introduced dolls of color with actual names, which
reversed an earlier decision in the 1970s to just call
all the dolls Barbie. But compared to all the
white Barbies on the shelves and plastered all over the merchandising, this is barely any effort at all. Then in 1991, after sales for Black
Barbie increased 20%, Mattel introduced a new line
of black Barbie fashion dolls named Shani, Asha, and Nichelle. But the way that these dolls were marketed was honestly a little questionable. The word choice that
they used to market Shani was very different from what
they used to market Barbie. For instance, one of the
descriptors for these Black dolls was that, "They have an outrageous flair for exotic elegance." Whatever the fuck that means. Despite inclusion in the
actual doll development, white blonde Barbie is
still the poster girl for literally all of their
merchandise: books, movies, lunchboxes, children's clothes... As Erica Rand writes in
"Barbie's Queer Accessories," "If the diversity displayed
on the toy shelves suggests that any kind of girl can be
Barbie, the diversity displayed in textual products suggests
something quite different. Any kind of girl can be Barbie's friend." But regardless of the slow, slow progress they're making to appease
marginalized groups, on the superficial side, Barbie is constantly adapting
to new fashion trends and new interests to
reflect the new generation, which is why I think she's
still a household name. She always appeases the mainstream. Barbies feminism is never controversial. She's a feminist in the sense
that she supports herself and that she cares about world
peace and the environment, but not feminist enough to
have a transparent stance on anti-imperialism or
even reproductive rights. And Mattel also doesn't want us to think about how Barbie is
disproportionately wealthy, what, with being able to afford a car, her own house and lots and
lots of luxury clothes. They want to put the focus
on how she can do anything. But for all we know she could be paying only about $750 in federal income tax. (upbeat music) Another reason why Barbie is so popular is because she upholds Ruth's core value: that Barbie means something different and personal to everyone. Barbie is a blank slate
that children can project their fantasies onto. In her 1994, autobiography
Ruth Handler wrote, "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." This was achieved to an extent, but Mattel did end up releasing a little bit of Barbie backstory against Ruth's original wishes, mainly because thousands and thousands of children wrote letters,
wondering who Barbie was, asking how she got started as a model, asking her where she lived... Another big reason, is that
financial advisors wanted to make more Barbie licensed
products, including books, and to introduce other dolls
into the Barbie universe. I don't know how many
kids ended up following the Barbie canon to a T, but I know from my own Barbie play, even though I was aware of
the Barbie Cinematic Universe- "Princess and the Pauper"
was the best one, sorry. (Man screaming) (Man gasping) (Man laughing) - Ah. - I had more fun, like renaming them and inventing
new storylines for them. As Amy Lefkov wrote in her article for the New York Times in 1994, "Ms. Quindlen says that
Barbie gives a little girls the message that the only
thing that's important is being tall and thin and having a big chest. Barbie gave us no messages. It was we who gave Barbie meaning." Lefkov also argues that Barbie
helped teacher compassion. She talks about how she owned the Barbies with the bendable knee joints. And when the bendable knee joint gave out, she wouldn't just toss her Barbies away. She would invent little
makeshift wheelchairs for them. Jennifer Dawn Whitney in her
thesis, "Playing with Barbie" adds that, "Through playing
with Barbie, children can build their emotional capacities, which ends up helping them
deal with real life problems in the future." For another example of this, the Children's Hospital of Los
Angeles actually used Barbie in therapy with children who
had to undergo amputation. After Barbie's arm or leg is removed she's fitted with a prosthesis and then this was gifted to the child. Ellen Zaman, director of
patient family services at the hospital said, "It helps the children understand
what will happen to them." However, Barbie was not the first toy to facilitate this kind
of imaginative play. In "Sugar and Spite: The Politics of Doll Play
in 19th century America," Miriam Formanek-Brunell talks about how, even though parents tried to get dolls to help girls
learn specific social rituals, like maternal devotion and appropriate female submissiveness, children would still play
the way they wanted to. For example, adults would
encourage these, like, doll funeral rituals to teach
girls the important aspect of female nurturing. However, memoirs of the time exposed that often little girls would
"act out aggressive feelings" and "hostile fantasies." Sometimes changing the emphasis
from "cathartic funerals" to "ritualized executions." But back to Barbie. We remember Barbie above all
of these other Victorian dolls, mainly because of Mattel's
successful marketing. Mattel blatantly encourages this type of individualized fantasy play and emphasizes how Barbie
is this aspirational figure, hence the, "We Girls Can Do Anything"... except for math apparently. - [Reporter] Most of what
the new Teen Talk Barbie says is pretty harmless considering the source, but some of the dolls are
programmed to say, and I quote, "Math class is tough." That has drawn fire from those who think Barbies remark
reinforces a stereotype about girls and math. - Consequently, people have
strong reactions to this claim. Sometimes these reactions are positive and sometimes they're negative. But the point is that
they have a reaction. Rand even found that
many adults use Barbie over any other toy to analyze
their childhood selves. For example, author Lisa
Jones wrote an essay about Barbie in her
collection "Bulletproof Diva" She describes first how
she cut off all the hair on her Barbie dolls and
dressed them in African prints, because at the time there weren't
many Black Barbie options. But she goes on to say that
after an incident at school, where she realized that all
the girls looked like Barbie, and none of them looked like her, she beheaded her Barbie
dolls and disfigured them. Lisa says that as a Black American woman who grew up post 1950s, she was culturally inscribed to have some sort of
relationship with Barbie, but for her, Barbie's
cultural dominance and her "We girls can do anything"
slogan made her feel othered. Because of how pervasive
Barbie is in our culture, she unfortunately becomes
a marker of whether or not we fit in with the other
girls... or the other boys if in the reverse case, you were a boy who liked Barbie when
all the other boys played with G.I. Joe. There has been a number
of studies published about how experiences in childhood shape our adulthoods. One study published in
Child Development found that the type of emotional
support a child receives during the first three and
a half years of their life has an effect on education, social life and romantic relationships, 20 to 30 years later. (Lady laughing) So it's no surprise that
a toy we grew up with or grew adjacent to has
such an effect on us, and why we revisit her when we reflect on our own personal journeys. But while it may be doom and gloom for most of us who grew up with the white, skinny,
blonde, femme Barbie that was plastered literally
over all forms of media, it is kind of nice to think
about how this new generation of kids will actually grow up with Barbies that look like them. But let it be known that
Claire Bates measured the Curvy Barbies proportions and wrote for BBC that Curvy
Barbie is still thinner than the average British
woman, age 16 to 24, and her dress size would be equivalent to about a US size 6. So then again, there are still ways to go. Okay, that's all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. Please let me know in the comments what your experiences
growing up with Barbie were, or if you didn't grow up with Barbie, what toy you were drawn to instead. Personally, I was a bigger fan of Bratz, like all the other hot girls. Just kidding. I just thought that
snapping off the ankles was a better design
decision for changing shoes because literally my number
one problem with Barbie is that her shoes would always fall off her little dainty little feet. But now that I'm older
and I have more knowledge of the fashion industry, I can at least appreciate
Barbie's designer collaborations, starting with the Oscar de
la Renta Barbies in 1998, and then all the
fantastical Bob Mackie ones. I'm not much of a collector
because I live in an apartment with not that much space and also I think dolls are
a little scary as an adult, but I can see why people
are drawn to these figures. Anyways, I hope you have
a lovely rest of your day and I'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. (upbeat music)
