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Trying to keep up with what’s hot and what’s not in the Christmas toy stakes is anything but child’s play. With newspaper lifestyle features and website listicles groaning with gift suggestions and predictions, diligent parents will be reaching for the festive sherry long before the big day.
Take heart, though, because there is one common theme running through them: what’s old is new again. Evergreen toys — from Tamagotchis to Hot Wheels, from LEGO to Star Wars action figures — are enjoying a December 25 revival, driven by tech burnout and a thirst for nostalgia.
Leading the throwback charge, in her curvy convertible, is Barbie, the plastic-fantastic doll that has been delighting young girls and filling the pockets of manufacturers Mattel since 1959 when the ‘Teen Age Fashion Model’ stunned the toy world by selling 300,000 units in its first year.
Little girls in the 1950s had previously played with dolls that looked like babies, socializing them for a life of motherhood and suburban homemaking.
Ruth Handler, co-founder and first president of the Mattel toy firm, had other ideas. Studying her daughter Barbara fussing with paper dolls, and concluding “little girls just want to be bigger girls,” she identified a gap in the market. Inspired partly by a German novelty toy, Lilli, that she stumbled upon during a trip to Europe, the insightful mom launched the first Barbie doll at a New York City fair on March 9, 1959.
But first she had to win over Mattel’s male executives, who feared American parents were not ready for a full-figured adult doll. Handler knew instinctively, however, that her mature 11.5-inch-high (30 cm) figurine, complete with glamorous wardrobe, would be an avatar upon which youngsters could project their own hopes and desires.
Barbie was no radical feminist, though. The first TV commercial in the U.S. soothed anxious parents by pitching the doll as an exemplar of feminine deportment and respectable grooming habits.
Overlooked perhaps in Barbie’s enduring story are the engineering feats underpinning its success. Each figurine is subject to a complex design process that can stretch to 18 months from conception to launch, and it took an aerospace engineer to transform Handler’s vision from patent diagram to toy-store shelves. Jack Ryan, hired as Mattel’s head of research and development in 1955 and aided by Handler’s husband Elliot, drew on all of his specialist skills to bring Barbie to life.
By 1965 Barbie had gained a chic new hairstyle, the ‘American Girl’ bob, as well as bendable legs that were hinged at the knee, and by 1968 — less than a decade after its launch — she and her plastic pals “spoke” for the first time with the aid of a mini spinning record and voice box hidden inside the torso.
Barbie’s journey from rough sketch to global totem is now being told at an exhibit at London’s Design Museum, which continues to Feb. 23, 2025. “Barbie has engaged with the design in all its forms since she was first introduced in 1959,” the curators say. “Now, the design world has reciprocated by engaging with Barbie as a key cultural reference point. The fashion world in particular has embraced Barbie as both muse and model.”
In more than 250 objects, including dolls and other artifacts from Barbie’s inception, this is a gloriously garish homage to its rise from standalone sales phenomenon to international brand.
“This world-building process was augmented by the launch of Barbie merchandise in the early 1960s,” the exhibition explains, “with branded products ranging from novels and comic books to Thermos flasks and record players.”
Barbie and her DreamHouse world are firmly rooted in Southern California, where Mattel has been based since it was founded in 1945, channelling its sun-dappled climate and surf culture to create a fictional world with boundless opportunities and freedom.
This aspirational milieu is notably evidenced in career choices, for Barbie has always been a “working girl.” From typical 1960s roles such as nurse, teacher and cheerleader, she has gone on to become an astrophysicist, chief executive and seven-time presidential candidate. Indeed, three years before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969, Astronaut Barbie was “established as a cultural and scientific pioneer.”
Her carefully designed outfits have also been a closely watched barometer of pop culture, with avant-garde fashion houses kitting out Barbie in clothes later seen on catwalks and sidewalks.
Barbie’s ubiquitous pinkness, meanwhile, was a late bloomer. The hot-pink hues so associated with the doll, described as one of the greatest branding victories of our time, did not emerge until the release of Superstar Barbie in 1977. Rows of pink-packaged dolls proved remarkably sales effective, the bold colour chiming perfectly with the conservative yuppie ethos of the 1980s and later the confidence and optimism of femininity.
Very much a child of the white-bread 1950s, Barbie could easily have fallen prey to the forces of political correctness long before now. But she has proved nothing if not adaptable, bending not just at the knee but to societal upheaval. We won’t mention the ‘Busty Barbie Doll’ of 1972.
That aside, the world’s “most diverse doll brand” has been moulded into 35 skin tones, 76 distinctive hair styles, four body shapes and a variety of disabilities, forging a resume of more than 260 careers and a closet showcasing six decades of fashion. The first black and Hispanic Barbies arrived in 1980, and since then hundreds of distinct head and body moulds have been manufactured. Mattel’s creation has been feted by Time and Vogue magazines, painted by Andy Warhol, and last year landed on Forbes’ list of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.
The movie release of Barbie in 2023 further cemented the plaything’s longevity. Starring Margot Robbie and directed by Greta Gerwig, the box-office smash created a new generation of fans and has pushed Barbie dolls and film-related merchandise into top-10 Christmas lists. And there really is something for everyone: the Fashionistas line has rolled out a Blind Barbie Doll in partnership with the American Foundation for the Blind.
In the film, Canadian actor Ryan Gosling memorably portrayed Ken, the male doll released in 1961 as Barbie’s boyfriend. A clean-cut embodiment of collegiate masculinity, Ken Carson has been given his own makeover through the decades and is now deliberately undefined — a laid-back surfer dude open to any role-play possibilities.
But that’s a story for another day. After all, he’s just Ken.