Doll Parts
Image: Petra Rajnicova, courtesy of the Design Museum.
"I entered this project expecting to produce something that was more play oriented,” says Danielle Thom, curator of the Design Museum’s latest show, Barbie®: The Exhibition. “Something more explicitly child-focused, more about experiencing Barbie in the moment.”
Thom and her team, however, have ended up presenting something much more rigorous: a detailed exploration of the doll’s 65-year evolution, focusing first on Barbie’s body before moving onto her many accessories and wider cultural impact. Although the exhibition design by architecture practice Sam Jacob Studio may be full of hot pink walls and dazzling iridescent plinths, the playfulness ends there: Barbies and their accoutrements are encased in glass vitrines away from curious hands.
Image: Jo Underhill.
The exhibition kicks off with a grainy video of disembodied torsos floating down conveyor belts, and factory workers tickling Barbie’s armpits with rotary tools. The footage, filmed by Mattel co-founder Eliot Handler in 1958 at a factory in Japan, documents Barbie’s entire production process. Barbie’s body parts are made by spinning plastic granules in a mould at high speed and high temperature until they melt, and her hair sewn on a sewing machine before being cut and styled by hand. The making process hasn’t changed too much since then, although certain elements, such as putting on Barbie’s face paint, are now automated. From the the late 60s onwards, Mattel also started making some Barbie models more lifelike by adding a greater range of movement, in addition to releasing talking Barbies.
Barbie’s face, however, is ever-changing. The doll’s head moulds – the blank bone structure of its face – are regularly adapted, often to reflect the beauty standards of the time. Original Barbies had plumper cheeks, for example, while modern Barbies have fuller lips. Often the changes were so subtle that I didn’t notice that two dolls shared the same head mould before reading the captions, although I was surprised to learn that Barbie still uses the same head moulds for dolls of different ethnicities, often relying on face paint to alter their appearance. Over the years, however, Mattel has produced dolls with a broader range of features – notably, in the 1990s, the brand repurposed head moulds used for The Marvellous World of Shani, a line of exclusively Black dolls, to create the first Black Barbies with more more authentic features.
The “Curvy” Barbie, first released in 2016. Image: Mattel.
Undoubtedly, though, the biggest change to Barbie’s body was adding a curvier model in the 2010s. Barbie’s original body shape was inspired by the Bild Lili doll, a joke gift for men that was based on a comic strip about a sex worker featured in West German newspaper Bild Zeitung. From her inception, Barbie was criticised for perpetuating unrealistic beauty standards, but it would take a sustained lull in sales for Mattel to finally release a “Curvy” model in 2016. One of the first of these “Curvy” models is on display wearing a peplum top, a popular style in the 2010s that was often marketed to fuller figured women to hide stomachs and accentuate waists. Though still very slim, the doll looks much more like a real human being: it is slightly-pear-shaped, and its calves look thick enough to actually carry weight. “When people around the world close their eyes and think of Barbie, they see a specific body,” Eliana Dockterman wrote in TIME when the Curvy doll was released. “If that body changes, Barbie could lose that status.” Working for Barbie presents a particular conundrum for designers: like other toy brands, Mattel’s team designs for both children and their parents. But while most successful toy brands only last three to five years, Mattel’s designers also have to keep in mind the 65-year history of the brand and its cultural legacy. “Barbie is under our guardianship,” says Kim Culmone, the senior vice president of doll design for Mattel. “But she doesn't belong to us.”
Although she has been rendered in three body types, 25 different skin tones and worked 260 careers, Barbie is still culturally synonymous with whiteness, unrealistic beauty standards and materialism. The brand’s history is peppered with dark anecdotes, such as releasing a doll clutching a diet book titled “Don’t Eat”, and the air-headed Teen Talk Barbie being programmed to whine: “Math class is tough.” The exhibition doesn’t delve into these controversies, however, instead presenting the journey of the doll’s design without significant cultural commentary. This, perhaps, makes sense: access to Mattel’s archives and processes is essential for an exhibition that delves so intimately into the doll’s design, but collaborating so closely with Mattel probably made it impossible to present a more critical view of its product – after all, even the title of the exhibition carries a trademark symbol. “I think it's really important to say this is a very tightly conceived exhibition,” Tim Marlow, director of the Design Museum, says. “It’s giving audiences the opportunity to respond playfully, or not, in their own ways.”
Image: Jo Underhill.
Even though Barbie has been late to embracing body positivity, however, the brand’s longevity relies on its eagle-eyed ability to predict trends. In the 1970s, for example, Barbie rode an orange camper van and lived in a mansion with clashing floral wallpaper, while in the 1990s she owned a lava lamp and a futon. She donned big-shouldered gowns inspired by Princess Diana’s looks in the 1980s, and pieces inspired by Black-owned streetwear brands in the 2010s. “Mattel’s creative teams are, for the most part, extraordinarily good at hitting a certain sweet spot in the trend cycle,” Thom says, adding that the Barbie brand is at its most successful when its products are on trend enough to be desirable, but not so avant-garde that they aren’t recognisable. “Really, what we’re exploring when we look back at the history of Barbie in the 21st century is a history of mainstream taste.”
Spending time around so many Barbies, even when shielded by glass, brought back vivid sensory memories. I remember the feel of her chewy ankles against my teeth, and the roughness of her matted hair after too much careless play. As such, my favourite part of the exhibition design was the Barbie hair chandelier, which brought home the uncanny intimacy of Barbie’s physicality. Although I appreciated the meticulousness of the Design Museum’s approach to Barbie and her legacy, part of me just wanted to touch a doll. I particularly wanted to play with the “Curvy” Barbie, who didn’t yet exist when I was a child; I wondered if I’d have to wiggle her clothes on past her hips the same way I do when I get dressed. And although I enjoyed Sam Jacob Studio's colourful sets, it was a shame that the Design Museum had not commissioned a woman-led studio for a project that is so overtly tied to women and their representation within culture.
Image: Jo Underhill.
But presenting a more grown-up display of Barbie is, actually, on trend. “The largest and fastest growing population of toy enthusiasts are actually adults in the industry right now,” Culmone says. “We’re seeing an explosion around adult collectibles and adults buying toys for themselves.” She attributes this trend in part to people picking up old hobbies during the pandemic lockdowns, and a “playfulness that’s occurring culturally right now.” The Barbie exhibition takes visitors on a walk down memory lane to see the fashion, beauty, architecture and interior trends of decades past, and although the dolls are still primarily marketed to children, part of the appeal of the display is the nostalgia of recognising cultural moments you lived through. “I think it’s amazing that this kind of vast, macro level, cultural story can be told through a toy,” Thom says. “It’s actually an incredible phenomenon.”
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown