Barbie, pop icon

“She’s as pretty as a peach blossom”, read the box and her name – Barbie Peaches and Cream – said it all. Although just a doll (© Mattel, Inc. 1984), and this is hard to convey, she was more, she was a heavenly and quite enchanting character.

My sister never left hers from the moment she received one, prolonging her childhood far beyond the norm. I remember her eyelids trembling when, as if hypnotised, she admired her pink perfection. The smooth face and fine features; the fluffed up hair steeped in an unreal light; that great cloud of diaphanous tulle and the distinctive pink ruffle, all scrunched up, that wound from the waist around her arms and up to the neck, like a fancy.

“Barbie, c’est moi” – said BillyBoy* but we know this does not apply to everyone. As I grew and expanded, my sister, older than me and with a finer bone structure, passed down her cast-off clothes, moulded to her slim line and which I calamitously filled. There was always a dangling sleeve or a zip ready to explode that made me seriously doubt our shared ancestry. When I was given a Barbie doll all of my own, a Tropical Barbie – hair down to her knees and a tiny swimsuit with the stylish addition of a frangipani garland – the thought that she lacked my problems (any leggings, polo-neck or spacesuit you slipped on fitted her perfectly) was slightly comforting but, I must admit, also depressing, precisely because she differed so completely from me. So, although my sister fully identified with her Barbie’s sophisticated world of tulle, curls and high heels, I struggled to adapt to the barefoot beach life of mine. The years that followed did nothing but confirm her image as an incurable romantic and, it goes without saying, I have never learnt to swim.

The “Barbie. The Icon” exhibition (on until 13 March at the Museo delle Culture in Milan and then at the Complesso del Vittoriano in Rome) tells the fabulous and very romantic story of what is commonly considered a pop icon as well as being the quintessential female, who goes by the name of Barbara Millicent Roberts, aka Barbie. There are hundreds of them in this sugary-sweet and extremely sentimental exhibition, most drawn from the Antonio Russo Collection: from the very first, the Original Teenage Fashion Model Barbie Doll (striped jersey swimsuit, sunglasses, ponytail, hoop earrings and arched eyebrows) presented at the New York Toy Fair on 9 March 1959 to the Supersize Barbie Doll of 1977; from the sophisticated Black Barbie of 1980 (dark skin, black eyes and hair) to the Totally Hair Barbie of 1992 (the biggest seller ever) and the Jennifer Lopez Red Carpet version of 2013.

Barbie, we learn, was inspired by a mother observing her daughter. Ruth Handler, the wife of Mattel founder Elliot Handler, spent whole afternoons watching her daughter Barbara (whose name Barbie borrowed) busily cutting out photographs of the day’s celebrities, such as Dolores del Río and Rita Hayworth, from magazines and playing with them as if they were puppets. She realised that dolls could come in adult form and not just look like a baby. Her patent was based on these shapely examples and, more importantly, on the super-sexy Bild Lilli, a German doll with a narrow waist and long legs that Ruth spotted in a Locarno toyshop. Mattel’s rivals laughed at the doll “with a bust” but millions of young girls rushed to buy them, delighted at being able to cast aside baby bottles and chubby dolls and devote their time to pool parties and boyfriends.

Touring the exhibition (there is a whole room of dream houses, caravans and Art Nouveau furniture), it almost seems that Barbie has shifted the identification from a maternal-caring plane to one of the chum and confidant. Little girls no longer play at being “mummy” but become a “friend”. Even Barbie arrives at the menopause (57 years), unmarried and with no children (she had no belly button until 2006), despite a long engagement with the suave Ken (named after Ruth’s son Kenneth), who is more brother than boyfriend. It is as if Barbara could never become Ruth, frozen in the guise of an immature teenager, like a chilled dessert still in its mould.

We notice that Barbie’s body and face (unlike her skin, eyes and hair) have only occasionally been given a lift in the last 60 years. Indeed, there have been just three facial restylings since 1959. The first Barbie had a fixed, sideways gaze, which was not straightened until 1971. By 1964, Miss Barbie could bat her eyelids and, three years later, Barbie Twist ’N Turn could bend her knees and elbows. In 1977, the sculptor Joyce Clark redesigned Barbie’s facial features, modelling them on Charlie’s Angel Farrah Fawcett. In the 1980s, her stiff L-shaped arms were relaxed at long last while Barbie’s heels, with a large turn of the ankles, only managed to touch the ground a few months ago. At this point, you realise why this sublimated body takes on the original meaning of the term – sculpted in the exhibition title – of an “icon”, in the sense of an unalterable prototype, in the interpretation dictated by Slavs and Byzantines. A purified body, unchanging and remained virtually identical over the years. At least until today!

What has happened is that the cover of this week’s Time magazine features a full-page picture of a different Barbie, decidedly rounder in form, with Kim Kardashian-like thighs and a fuller tummy. The question she asks sounds more like an entreaty: “Now can we stop talking about my body?” It is Mattel latest brainwave, seemingly a response to the need for a realistic subtext – something that reminds us of what is recognisable and human, even in a doll – but primarily to address plummeting sales. It has fattened up the svelte frame of a Barbie who has always been skin and bone (in 1963, she was even sold with a book entitled Don’t Eat) and produced a plumper and more seductive version. Curvy – the name of this new “shapely” Barbie – can already be purchased online (complete with wardrobe of made-to-measure garments i.e. looser and hanging), along with the other two new entries, totally ignoring the standard height of 29.5 centimetres: Barbie Tall and Barbie Petite.

At MUDEC, the famous Barbie motto “I can be” that has fuelled the dreams of aspiring young obstetricians, astronauts and senators the world over appears in large letters, legitimising an exhibition that primarily features abundant examples of the rapid metamorphoses that turn a Caucasian Barbie into a Japanese Barbie, a hippie Barbie into a rock Barbie and a painter Barbie into a gymnast Barbie. Now, however, with the arrival of the new Barbies – well-fed, gangly and mini (here absent from the catwalks) – the evolutional challenge departs from wigs and make-up to venture, at long last, into size.

The fact that the new figure of the Curvy Barbie sorely tested Time journalist Eliana Dockterman in the simple operation of slipping a dress on her – “Try going feet first” she is told – says much about Barbie’s wardrobe (liberated from being one size). It is now, in a slight exaggeration, closer to the Roland Barthes definition of clothing and farther from that of costume – in the sense of standard, ritualised and stereotyped attire, regardless of the individual subjects, and by clothing we mean individual attire to which value can only be added or subtracted by the person wearing it. A play on underwear as yet not seen in this exhibition and which will presumably create some havoc (Mattel has already opened a help line for all the complaints – and they guarantee they will come – from those who buy garments that are too long, too short, too tight or too loose), placing Barbie in a totally new dimension of mix-ups and adaptations, not only clothes-wise. Whether she is Curvy or Peaches and Cream.

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until 13 March 2016
Barbie. The Icon
Mudec
via Tortona 56, Milan