Life in plastic is fantastic, and Barbie has been making life look effortless since 1959. With the release of Barbie, the highly anticipated movie featuring Margot Robbie in the iconic role—and the Barbiecore phenomenon, featuring home décor and wardrobes in Barbie's signature pink—the doll is only getting more popular in her sixties.
While she always looks great in pink, Barbie's look has evolved over the years: From '60s eyeliner to '80s hair, she's tried virtually every trend each decade has had to offer. She's also taken on a ton of different careers and adapted to make the world of Barbie more inclusive and diverse over the years.
The Totally Hair Barbie from 1992 featured the longest tresses ever and still stands as the best-selling Barbie doll to date—but even if you weren't born that year, maybe you were lucky enough to have a birth year that honored one of Barbie's other major milestones or most legendary looks. In honor of our favorite doll and her fab friends, we're taking a trip down toy memory lane and highlighting the new (and thus, usually the most popular) Barbie that hit the scene each year since 1959.
To say that Barbie has become ubiquitous is not an understatement.
We’re just short of the Barbie movie hitting theatres (July 21) and it’s been a non-stop Barbie blitz. The trailers for the film have sparked endless memes, parent company Mattel has partnered with more than 100 brands to market the movie, and embracing of the film’s aesthetic has caused #Barbiecore to trend for months on social media.
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It’s becoming clear that the Barbie movie will likely be a raging success.
Even if one were to set aside the star-studded cast (Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu, etc.) and big-name director (Greta Gerwig), the intense and over-the-top Barbie bombardment for the past six months shows no signs of slowing down, and most people seem to be more amused than fatigued by the piling on of pink.
But dark shadows linger over the Barbie brand, and some are baffled as to why the world is so willing to look beyond the doll’s problematic past and gaze at Mattel’s onslaught through rose-coloured glasses.
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The problems for Barbie started right out of the gate.
The first iterations of the doll’s design in 1959 were inspired by the Bild Lilli doll – a racy, buxom doll marketed to German men and sold in adult stores. In her origin as a cartoon strip character, Lilli was known to be a gold-digger with an oversized bust and was often portrayed in sexy clothing, giving snappy comebacks to drooling men.
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The Bild Lilli doll is based upon the cartoon character Lilli created by German cartoonist Reinhard Beuthien for the newspaper Bild-Zeitung, Hamburg, Germany.
SSPL / Getty Images
And while Mattel’s design team softened the face and body of Barbie, she still wound up with unrealistic proportions — a woman of Barbie’s weight, combined with her hip-waist-bust measurements, would not be able to stand up without tipping over, nor would she be able to menstruate, said doctors.
For this, Barbie’s been accused of perpetuating unrealistic beauty standards and promoting gender stereotypes. And while Mattel, in more recent years, has attempted to deliver more inclusive Barbies — in 2019, the company introduced Creatable World, its first series of gender-neutral Barbies, while three years earlier, it launched Barbie Fashionistas that came in four body types, seven skin tones, 22 eye colours and 24 hairstyles — the company has also played directly into the narrative.
One of her more scandalous moments came quite early in her history when a 1963 teenage “babysitter” Barbie was sold with a doll-sized diet book titled How to Lose Weight: Don’t Eat. In the 1990s, critics were incensed over a talking Barbie who came pre-loaded with a ditzy declaration: “Math class is tough.”
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(Simpsons fans might also recall a 1994 episode about Malibu Stacey, the show’s answer to a Barbie doll, who famously proclaimed “Don’t ask me, I’m just a girl!” when her cord was pulled.)
60 years ago Barbie wrote a seminal book on fasting, HOW TO LOSE WEIGHT. A slim tome, it included 1 page with the two words, “DON’T EAT!” joining advocates of fasting Ben Franklin and Ghandi.
It’s tough to measure if Barbie has affected children’s body image or self-worth, or if they’ve internalized any of the unrealistic beauty standards of Barbie at all.
Most studies on the topic have been conducted on small groups of girls and have yielded lukewarm results.
Some researchers claim that Barbie is just one of many influences in the lives of young girls that prioritize and encourage rail-thin figures in western culture. Others are critical of these studies, saying that research conducted on girls nearing puberty is skewed, as it’s this time in a girl’s life when she becomes more critical of her physicality anyway.
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Even attempts by Mattel to be more inclusive have backfired.
That same year, a collaboration project between Mattel and Nabisco resulted in a massive recall when it was brought to attention that “Oreo Fun Barbie” — a Black doll with an Oreo-branded outfit and cookie purse — was derogative to the Black community, as “Oreo” has been used as a racial slur.
Still, those coming to Barbie’s defence, including Mattel itself, will point to Barbie’s progressive and feminist career trajectory over the years.
Over the years, she’s held hundreds of careers, including when she “broke the plastic ceiling” and travelled to the moon in 1956 (four years before Neil Armstrong), ran for president, and held esteemed jobs like computer engineer, paleontologist and rock star.
Barbie has held hundreds of jobs over the years.
Mattel
But, again, Barbie as a working woman has faced her share of hiccups. As recently as 2010, Mattel faced backlash when a companion book included with Computer Engineer Barbie showed the main character infecting her computer with a virus and needing her male co-workers to help her get the problem sorted.
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Through a complicated combination of missteps, adults projecting various stereotypes and mores onto Barbie and a surge in alternatives in the doll market, Mattel was left with plummeting sales and interest in the Barbie brand by the mid-2010s.
Girls need more role models. Let’s inspire the next generation to see themselves in careers underrepresented by women. By encouraging more girls to explore STEM with Robotics Engineer #Barbie, we show them that they can be anything. https://t.co/kRIQ50Ox4Y#YouCanBeAnythingpic.twitter.com/aqHFYqDQ6r
“Back in 2014 and 2015, we hit a low and it was a moment to reflect in the context of, ‘Why did Barbie lose relevance?’” Ricard Dickson, Mattel’s president and chief operating officer, recently told CNN.
“She didn’t reflect the physicality, the look, if you will, of the world around us. And so we then set a course to truly transform the brand with a playbook around reigniting our purpose.”
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Mattel told CNN its hope is that the Barbie movie will give its brand a boost. While sales for the doll were up during the pandemic, they slumped again in the first quarter of 2023.
Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie attend the red carpet promoting the upcoming film ‘Barbie’ at the Warner Bros. Pictures Studio presentation during CinemaCon, the official convention of the National Association of Theatre Owners, at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace on April 25, 2023 in Las Vegas.
Greg Doherty / WireImage
And while it’s too soon to tell if the movie will boost Mattel’s bottom line, the company is likely gleefully watching the hype surrounding the movie.
The internet is awash in anticipation of Friday’s release and the reviews are, for the most part, positive. A movie version of the doll has sold out, and on Wednesday it was announced that the film has the most ticket presales since Avatar: The Way of Water.
The stars and director of the film, too, have painted the movie as a tongue-in-cheek look at Barbie’s history, the brand’s misfires, as well as the rhetoric surrounding the doll since her conception.
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Gerwig also committed to casting a critical lens on the patriarchy and set the Barbie movie in a world where women are in charge — for example, Issa Rae plays President Barbie, and Barbie Land has all women justices on its Supreme Court.
“I think in a lot of other hands, a Barbie movie would remain surface level. But I knew Greta (Gerwig) was going to have a lot to say, and I knew she was going to Trojan Horse a lot of… big issues within a very fun world,” Margot Robbie, who plays the titular role, said.
Mattel’s strategy over the years to make the Barbie brand more diverse and inclusive will also be reflected back to audiences through the casting choices, said Robbie.
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“I hope people walk away… I hope that they feel good about themselves watching it,” she said. “I feel like there’s some sort of relief in this movie and that the message ultimately is, ‘You’re good. You’re good as you are.’”
No matter how you slice it, Barbie has always been — and will continue to be — a lightning rod. Debates surrounding her moral and social significance will continue to rage, no matter how many new dolls or movies are put out into the world.
For some, she will continue to represent all that is wrong with beauty ideals and capitalism, while others will continue to hold her up as a conduit for the dreams and aspirations of young children.
Just as real women are policed every day for their bodies, their dreams, how they act and what they achieve, so, too, will Barbie.
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Of all the things about the latest round of the Barbie marketing blitzkrieg, perhaps the most standout element to the (feminine) masses was the tagline touting, “She’s everything. He’s just Ken.” This with Barbie (Margot Robbie) presented in the top “hole” of the B and Ken (Ryan Gosling) rightly situated “on bottom.” With five simple words, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach (the Joan Didion [a fellow Sacramentan like Gerwig] and John Gregory Dunne of our time) have cut to the core of flipping the script on a societal viewpoint that’s typically directed at men…who see women as “background.” So often foolishly believing they’re the “stars” of the show with “old chestnuts” like, “Behind every great man is a great woman.” This horrific back-handed “compliment” of a saying serving only to reiterate that women’s reproductive and emotional labor is not only meant to be “invisible,” but it’s also expected. Simply “goes with the territory” of being a woman.
With the advent of the so-called Equal Pay Act in 1963 (just in the U.S., mind you), women were essentially told, “You can be ‘equal’ to men in the productive labor sphere, too—so long as you keep performing the same reproductive labor at home.” For to be a woman is to take on the burden of everything silently and with a smile. Perhaps that’s why it’s no coincidence that, just a few years earlier, Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler, was incited to create a different kind of doll after witnessing her daughter play with the available toys for girls at the time, compared to those available for boys. The idea behind Barbie (named in honor of Ruth’s daughter, Barbara) thus arose from wanting to give girls the opportunity to envision their futures through lenses beyond just “mother” or “homemaker.”
Barbie was the first doll of its kind, encouraging women to imagine the possibilities of their gender beyond the clearly-defined role of “supporting act” to the presumed man in her life. As such, a year before the Equal Pay Act, Mattel released Barbie’s first Dreamhouse—the assumption being that she actually might have paid for it herself (Ken had only entered the picture a year before, in 1961)…even if this was still before a woman was “allowed” to open her own bank account. Chillin’ at the crib by herself, Barbie served as a catalyst for the idea that a woman could actually buy a home of her own one day, without the presence of a man to sully it. Or, if he did, at least she could tell him to get the fuck out.
Barbie’s undercutting feminist revolution continued in 1965, with the release of Astronaut Barbie, effectively proving that she, a woman, made it to the moon four years before Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. Then, Mattel (with Ruth at the Barbie helm) got really progressive in 1968 by “daring” to introduce Christie, the first Black doll, and a purported friend of Barbie’s…which would technically make her an OG of allyship (apart from Marilyn Monroe), but let’s not make this any more about white women than it always is. Another major overhaul on the potential for what a woman “could” be occurred in 1985, with CEO Barbie (a true testament to the total embracement of capitalism-on-steroids under Reagan). The first of her kind to really show that a woman was able to “have it all.” But, again, the unspoken caveat here is that she’s still expected to carry out her “inherent duties” as a woman. This pertaining to the reproductive labor associated with household management and childcare.
In Alva Gotby’s They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life, she gets to the heart of this double standard by noting, “Women’s labor, especially that which is sexual or maternal, is conflated with their bodies and constructed as a natural instinct. This naturalization is essential for the capitalist use of reproductive labor. The capacity for reproductive labor is turned into a natural quality of certain bodies whose function is primarily to carry out that labor. If it is not work, it is worthless economically, but also natural and therefore good.” This is part of the reason Barbie’s various “personae” have been fractured into so many “professions,” all while still maintaining her plastered-on smile and ostensibly “personable” aura (read: looking like the classic male ideal of what a female should “be”). All of which is expected of a “good” woman. “The naturalization of feminized labor, and particularly emotional labor,” Gotby adds, “not only makes that work appear as unskilled labor but also makes it invisible as labor. It is merely an eternal and unchangeable quality of feminine personalities… Women’s emotional labor is seen as a natural expression of their spontaneous feeling, something that is in turn used to further exploit this work.” I.e., touting that women “can have it all” while Ken sits back and actually does fuck-all.
Hence, “He’s just Ken.” He gets a gold star just for being there. Whereas women have to work twice as hard in every facet of life to be taken “seriously.” Which is where the matter of women’s appearance comes into play. On the one hand, if a woman is “hot,” like Barbie, the snap judgment that will be made about her is that she must not be very smart. On the flipside, a woman won’t be considered for much of anything at all if she doesn’t put some “effort” into cultivating a “pleasant” appearance. Barbie reinforces this trope for sure. She’s “visually pleasing,” but she can also embody everything from eye doctor Barbie to smoothie bar worker Barbie, transitioning from white to blue collar work as effortlessly as Pete Davidson transitions from one high-profile girlfriend to another.
So yes, “She’s everything. He’s just Ken” has never felt more resonant as a much-needed spotlight on the continued manner in which women are expected to be literally everything (particularly a hybrid of mother/girlfriend) to everyone while men can just show up without putting in any of the excess emotional labor that women have to. They’re just men, after all. Only so much can be expected of “God’s gift.”
