Barbie Is the Most Popular Doll in America—She’s Also the Most Controversial, Diverse, and Ambitious
“The reason I liked Barbie is because we never stuck to the prescribed accessories or costumes,” Dumas says. “She could be a doctor or a vet or an astronaut, and there should be Barbies that all kids can see themselves in. That’s great. But to me the point of Barbie is still what happens outside that prescribed narrative. She’s problematic, but that imagination part never gets old.”
For Anne Donahue, a writer in Toronto, the improvised scripts she and her friends would write for their Barbies were “a map of what we felt growing up looked like.” With the dolls, Donahue inhabited a pretend world animated with real anxieties. Sex, love, careers, dramas, jealousies. “She was where we imagined adulthood,” Donahue says. “It was like VR, but miniature. And with incredible shoes.”
Even my feminist mother had once been desperate for Barbie. Her best friend Josie owned the bridal doll, and she craved it. But my grandmother deemed the $5 doll an absurd extravagance and forbade it. To my brother, sister, and me, it seemed absurd that the mother who once swore to us she wouldn’t come to our weddings if we had matching bridesmaid dresses lusted after a doll in such a conventional gown. But we decided she needed it. When we were 15, 11, and five, we pooled our allowances and ordered the bridal Barbie on eBay. When I asked her if she remembered our stunt, she didn’t miss a beat: “It remains one of the greatest presents I’ve ever gotten in my life.”
When Mattel launched the new shapes in 2016, the aim had been to make Barbie seem more inclusive. But it wasn’t some last-minute gesture. Mattel is a business, with a bottom line and shareholders to appease. To make a shift like this one was a massive investment. “Door heights, bathtub sizes, bicycles—everything has to be adjusted,” Kim Culmone, who’s been the vice president and head of design at Barbie since 2013, explains in Tiny Shoulders. “I think a lot of people see the product on the shelf and think, Oh, just change it. But it’s a huge operational undertaking.” Culmone ticks off the new realities: Who can fit in the car? Who fits in the elevator? When will the Dreamhouse be wheelchair accessible? The entire universe “has to shift.”
That universe includes customers too. In the film, which chronicles how the new bodies were developed and revealed, Culmone listens in on some of the focus groups that were assembled to test the bigger dolls. In one, a girl announces that she doesn’t like this Barbie because she’s fat. In another, girls giggle when one cries, “She has a fat butt!” The camera pans to Culmone, who looks at her feet.
Still, Culmone believed the idea would work. It had to, or Mattel faced irrelevance, not least because its competition now also includes the games and diversions kids can find online. The bet paid off. Mattel confirms that in both 2016 and 2017, the number-one best-seller in Barbie’s main line was a curvier red-headed doll. And with the introduction of the new shapes and some leadership adjustments, sales across the Barbie brand in general have started to rebound. Life in plastic, once more fantastic. “Beyond the sentiment and the headlines and the letters that get sent to me from parents and kids who want to thank our team,” Culmone says, “that indicates that it’s been successful.”
