![]() Feats of craftsmanship, engineered to blow up. defense contractor Raytheon to draw up plans that would give Barbie hip and shoulder sockets so that her limbs could move. She enlisted a Mattel executive who’d started his career at the U.S. She tapped a fashion designer to create a full Barbie wardrobe. With the basic elements nailed down, Handler moved on to the accessories. Handler named her Barbie, after her daughter. When she returned to America, Handler found a plant in Japan to mold a Lilli-like doll and Mattel hired a movie makeup artist to give her a more approachable expression. She snapped one up for Barbara and more for research. In modern parlance, we’d call it a “makeunder.” But Lilli proved it was possible to make a doll like the one Handler envisioned. She had her edits in mind-softer plastic, less severe proportions, and an à la carte wardrobe. The doll looked like a stripper, and Handler was entranced. It was 1956 and Handler was on vacation in Europe when she encountered the Bild-Lilli doll, a gag gift that men gave each other at bachelor parties. And soon she found her test case in, uh, a sex object. That part was important.īut Handler plowed ahead. Oh, and also, she had to have breasts, just like a grown woman. So she proposed a corrective: a miniature woman made from plastic with clothes that girls could swap out, like the ones the cutout dolls had. Handler knew the world was bigger than the bond between a mother and infant. Instead shops stocked infant dolls that seemed to reinforce the expectation that all girls should want children of their own. It struck her: “Little girls just want to be bigger girls.” But at the time stores didn’t sell adult dolls. (Until then she’d handled the finances, while her husband tinkered with his designs.) She’d wanted to make a grown-up three-dimensional doll for girls like her daughter Barbara and her friends, who lavished attention on the cardboard cutouts that Handler snipped out for them from women’s magazines. There’s no Mom-With-Three-Ungrateful-Kids Barbie.”īarbie had been Handler’s idea, the first product she’d ever dreamed up for Mattel. The writer Peggy Orenstein put it best in the recent Hulu film Tiny Shoulders: “For girls, the Barbie represented a kind of rebellion. And like all of her accessories, he was sold separately. An afterthought, Ken wasn’t introduced until 1961. Fine, she was a teen swimsuit model at first, but then a flight attendant, a teacher, and an astronaut. Or as she put it: “Knowing how to cook and keeping a good house? Oh shit, it was awful.” For all Barbie’s foibles-and the Sleepover Barbie released in 1965 that came with a scale set to 110 pounds and a diet book plastered with the words “Don’t Eat!” is but one example-it’s no surprise that when Handler created Barbie, she made her an independent woman and a wage earner. But the conventions of it? Well, those repelled her. In an interview, Handler said she loved motherhood. At 43, she was an executive vice president at Mattel, the behemoth brand she had founded with her husband Elliot Handler and his friend Harold Matson in 1944.įrom the moment Mattel was established, Ruth Handler decided to be essential to the business, both because she had brilliant ideas and because she couldn’t bear to remain at home. Handler was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland. ![]() But Ruth Handler was sure she would sell. ![]() At the time, she was an unprecedented experiment. ![]() Like most women born in 1959, she was underestimated from the start.īarbie made her first appearance at the New York Toy Fair that March. But then, she didn’t have to do a lot to exceed expectations. For a doll who was once programmed to complain that “math class is tough” on command, it’s all quite impressive.
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