At the latest celebration of the world’s most famous doll, everything is pink.
People speak in hushed tones, pointing out their favorite — the one they had, or wanted desperately — and laugh with childish wonder about the fantastical stories they used the curvy, 11.5 inch figure to tell. Strangers of all ages swap tales and compare models. Some recall being forbidden to own the doll, with its rather sexy adult body; some profess disinterest or even disdain; and others wonder about how sustainable it is to produce so many of the plastic figures that three are sold every second.
Love her or hate her, Barbie — 65 this year and still basking in the glow of her recent Hollywood success — has a powerful hold on the cultural imagination of adults and children alike. At “Barbie: The Exhibition,” running through Feb. 23, 2025, at the Design Museum in London, 180 chronologically displayed dolls and accessories chart her aesthetic and sociocultural shifts.
The show opens with the original: the first Barbie ever, spotlit on a pedestal where she turns slowly in her strapless black-and-white-striped bathing suit, her tiny feet wedged into precariously high kitten-heel sandals, her blonde ponytail coif immaculate. Nearby, the first commercial for the doll plays on a monitor, its sugary sweet jingle drifting through subsequent rooms: “Barbie’s small and so petite, her clothes and figure look so neat!” and “Purses hats and gloves galore, and all the gadgets gals adore! Barbie, beautiful Barbie …”
When Ruth Handler, who co-founded Mattel in 1945 and acted as its first president, conceived of Barbie in the early 1950s, it was as an alternative to the omnipresent baby doll, which she thought — watching her daughter play — automatically socialized young girls for marriage and motherhood.
Barbie, launched to some skepticism from male executives in 1959, was an adult woman with a glamorous interchangeable wardrobe, offering more role play options. For parents spooked by Barbie’s maturity, Mattel developed more benign options, including a freckled best friend, Midge (1963) and little sister Skipper (1964). Ken, Barbie’s devoted boyfriend, appeared in 1961, with a head of strange velvet hair. And so, the franchise grew and grew.
Suspended in luminous, jewel-hued pods, we see how Barbie — a character, a brand, a mass manufactured object, a fantasy — has changed over the decades. “American Girl Barbie Doll” (1965) is tanned and has a thick, wig-like blonde bob. Her heavy lidded blue eyes peer coquettishly to the left. Two years later, “Twist ‘n Turn Barbie Doll” channels the Mod mood of the era with dangling earrings and a shiny drop-waist dress. Her long hair is less coarse in texture and she has thick protruding black eyelashes, as does her British friend “Twist ‘n Turn Stacey Doll” (1968), styled in a red velvet pantsuit as Barbie’s swinging London friend.
Hawaiian Barbie arrived in 1975, and from 1980, we also have Black, Hispanic and Asian Barbies, but it’s not until 2016 that she develops a fuller figure, as well as jointed limbs. In 2020, she also has a wheelchair, vitiligo, a hearing aid and prosthetic limbs.
Barbie also enjoys technical developments: Ensuing displays show her walking, talking and dancing. (“Wow! She’s real like me!” a girl says in a 1970 commercial for “Living Barbie.”) The names for some editions of the doll are charmingly bizarre: 1993 brought “Special Expressions Barbie Doll,” whose face is as immobile as that of her predecessors, and the best-selling “Earring Magic Ken,” whose powers remain enigmatic, but seem to have something to do with his pierced ear and oversized silver necklace. “Growing Up Skipper Doll” (1975) was developed to teach girls about puberty, but her abilities — when you raise her left arm she gets taller and grows breasts — are more uncanny than reassuring.
The exhibition is oddly credulous for a museum show, presenting Barbie as an unwaveringly progressive force for good — perhaps unsurprising, given it was developed in partnership with the corporate titan Mattel.
In a large final room, Barbie is a dentist, a doctor, a president, a chief executive, a computer engineer, a scientist and an astronaut. She has a mansion, a camper van, a cabin in Aspen, a hot rod, a mini car and a pool with a slide. She’s a police officer, she’s in Desert Storm and, if you can afford it, she has all the clothes a girl could ever want, because while Barbie can do anything, her most distinguishing characteristic is that she has a lot of stuff, and there is always something new to buy.
It would have been fascinating to learn more about Handler, who, later in life and following a double mastectomy after breast cancer, used her industrial contacts to produce a groundbreaking breast prosthesis; or to know about some of Barbie’s design missteps. (I’m old enough to remember the “Math class is tough” debacle).
Barbie may have ambitions to reflect the real world, but designers are not divinely objective and sometimes the world is ugly. Even children who love beautiful Barbie know that.