Barbie’s Fashion Has Won Me Over
A conversation with author Tanya Lee Stone on the role clothing has played in the doll’s story.
A few weeks ago, when the Princess of Wales wore a bubblegum pink suit, I wondered aloud on Instagram whether it was a nod to #Barbiecore. In the same breath, I confessed I was deeply skeptical of the doll’s resurgence — and her aesthetic — in the lead-up to the movie that hits theaters this weekend. Were we really willingly (some might even say gleefully) glorifying the portrayal of white, thin beauty “ideals” in 2023?
Take Barbie star Margot Robbie’s cover shoot for Vogue. The pictures were almost too perfect, designed to make the real-life person look as plastic as the toy. One image of Barbie sunning herself and sporting a noticeable thigh gap felt especially off. I wanted to believe this was all done with a wink — and certainly Robbie acknowledged the controversy around the doll in the accompanying story — but was that clear enough to viewers? Especially to younger people seeing these pictures?
Just as I was preparing to sit this Barbie moment out, along came Robbie’s stylist, Andrew Mukamal. I was friendly with Mukamal back when I lived in New York; his involvement in the press tour caught my eye. And — wow — has he delivered! Mukamal has been dressing Robbie in high-fashion recreations of actual Barbie styles (and documenting it all on his Instagram). Look after look has gone viral as Robbie has made her way around the globe promoting the film.
What’s more, it has been a delight to watch. Unlike the retouched photographs in a glossy magazine, this has felt like Barbie come to life — Robbie seems as though she is having a blast. “It's not subtle, but it’s very fun!” Robbie told People of her press tour fashion.
But mostly, the outfits are so clever, thoroughly recreated with the most satisfying of details (the open-toe mule stilletos might be my favorite). I am dying for a behind-the-scenes deep dive into how Mukamal sourced all of this.
The press tour made me think about the role of clothing in the doll’s history and I realized that to Barbie fashion is…everything? The doll’s appearance has changed over the years, with long overdue efforts by Mattel to make the toy more inclusive. But what you see first — and what defines each Barbie, really — is her outfit. That’s a very SMT idea, isn’t it?
“The clothes are a huge part of this movie and a huge part of Barbie,” Robbie told Vogue for its “Life in Looks” video series. “Like everything in the Barbie movie, it’s super superficial but it’s also incredibly profound at the same time. She can put on a suit and she’s a lawyer. She can put on a space helmet and she’s an astronaut. She can do all these things and she was doing it back in a time when women couldn’t even have their own bank accounts.”
Ok! Consider me even more intrigued. I wanted to know more about Barbie and her creator, Ruth Handler. Enter Dr. Tanya Lee Stone, author of the book The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie along with more than a dozen other titles for young readers. Stone’s writing focuses largely on female empowerment, which made her choice to tackle the beloved but controversial doll especially interesting to me.
Below Stone shares a bit more on how Handler introduced Barbie back in 1959 as well as the role of the doll’s clothing and how her look has evolved.
💕 But first: Are you going to see the Barbie movie this weekend? Are you planning to wear something special? Please take a photograph of yourself in your Barbie best and email it to me — along with all the *thought* you put into your ensemble — at Hello@SoManyThoughts.com. I’d love to see what you put together and hear about what Barbie means to you. (Hoping to share a few of my faves, too!)
Stay tuned! I will be SMTing some of Robbie’s Barbie movie tour fashion as well as taking a look at the complicated meaning of the color pink later this week.
Tanya Lee Stone on Barbie and her Fashion
Please note: Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
Why did you want to write a book about Barbie?
Dr. Tanya Lee Stone: I have been an editor and an author and a professor for a pretty long time. I primarily write for children and young adults. I had written a book about Ella Fitzgerald for the Penguin Random House’s “Up Close” series. After that book was finished, my editor asked me if I would like to choose another topic. I said, “Sure, let’s review the parameters: We’re talking about a 20th or 21st century American icon who has had a significant impact on our culture that children and young adults will know.”
I told my editor I wanted to write about Ruth Handler and Barbie. And my editor laughed because the other people in the series included Frank Lloyd Wright, Thurgood Marshall, and Eleanor Roosevelt. And I said, “I’m not kidding. Ruth Handler and Barbie embodies all of those things.” So she said, “Ok, pitch it.” The publisher loved it and told me to pick my own angle and do it as a standalone book. That was even better.
What was it about Handler’s story that appealed to you?
The whole driving force behind not only Barbie, but Mattel, is Ruth. Ruth Handler was from a huge Jewish family in Denver, Colo., and so was Elliot, her husband. They met as teenagers, got married and moved to California. She was working at Paramount for a little while, mostly because somebody told her that she’d never be able to get a job there. What I love about Ruth is that if you told her something was impossible, she would set out to prove you wrong.
Elliot was making little sculptures for doll furniture out of Lucite, which was a new material post-World War II. Ruth thought that they were beautiful and she said, “I can sell these things. Let’s start a company.” They partnered up with another guy, [Harold] ‘Matt’ Mattson — together Elliot Handler and Matt Mattson made “Mattel.” They couldn’t figure out how to get Ruth’s name in the title.
They started the business out of their garage. And when they couldn’t find somebody to deliver toys, Ruth learned how to drive a delivery truck. She did everything and was going to figure out everything.
What was Handler out to achieve with this doll?
Ruth Handler’s original intention was of building a girls’ play experience all about whatever they wanted to be, whether that’s a nurse or a doctor. She wasn’t an ultra-feminist who believed that girls shouldn’t be nurses, they should only be doctors. She believed in choice with a capital “C.” And she wanted to do that through fashion. For her, it was all about the clothes and the doll was a teeny tiny mannequin.
What Ruth was really doing was three-dimensionalizing the play experience of paper dolls that had been so frustrating for girls at that age. Ruth was watching her daughter, Barbara, and her friends play with these paper dolls. The dolls would rip and the paper tabs on the clothes would rip, and it wasn’t as satisfying. They also did not want to play with their baby dolls anymore and be pigeonholed into mama figures. Ruth thought: I want to three-dimensionalize this play experience.
I remember my mom had the original Barbie — she was wearing a black-and-white bathing suit. Was that the first Barbie fashion?
Let me see if I can find something in my book about that first toy fair in March 1959 when Barbie was introduced. [Tanya reads from her book:] “The displays were gorgeous with Barbie center stage at the top of a curved white staircase poised to sweep down, wearing a white wedding gown. Other blonde and brunette Barbie dolls modeled more than 20 different outfits.” [EH note: Twenty outfits! You can see many of them in the 1959 commercial included above.]
But things didn’t go well at that first toy fair. It took until about the end of the school year, when the kids got out of school and started buying the toys. Ruth was upset at first. She had put so much effort into it and she felt like it hadn’t succeeded. But she also didn’t back down.
Even Elliot said, “Maybe people don’t like a doll with breasts like this.” And Ruth’s opinion was: Well, women have breasts, and I want girls to imagine what they’re going to be like when they’re women. Was [Barbie] a teenage doll? Was it an adult doll? It was open to some interpretation. But [her shape] was about the clothes fitting well on this little mannequin. So she didn’t really back down about that — she just thought that the men were wrong.
What do you make of Barbie’s controversial figure?
If there’s one thing I believe, it’s that Ruth Handler had absolutely no intention of this doll shape ever making anybody feel bad about themselves. She wasn’t idealizing a figure that she wanted girls to have. She was promoting the concept that they could be anything that they wanted to be. And she was coming at it through fashion and a mannequin form. [EH note: For more on Barbie’s shape and evolution, check out this Time cover story.]
What was Handler’s relationship to fashion like?
She was pretty fashionable. She always looked really put together. This was the late 1950s, early 1960s in Hollywood — Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo. The pin-up girl was the ideal starlet. That’s what the Handlers were around. My aunt was in Hollywood at that time, married to a TV producer and stunning. Everything was high fashion. You dressed to go to dinner.
Do you have a sense of when Barbie’s clothes shifted from beautiful social clothes, like dinner dresses, to something more career-focused?
Pretty much right away. In 1959, we had Barbie as a fashion model, but we also had business executive. Not secretary — business executive. And in 1965, the year I was born, we had astronaut. That’s 18 years before [the first female astronaut] Sally Ride.
And also the outfit was appropriately astronaut-ish — that’s really Ruth — as opposed to the 1980s Barbie astronaut, much fluffier and pinker, not very much fit to go into space. But Ruth’s concept of that was much more “Let’s get this job done.”
How has Barbie’s look changed over the years?
The biggest thing isn’t about clothes, it was her face. We went from this sideways, downward coy glance to the direct gaze that we have now in the seventies. That was reflecting what was going on in the feminist movements. Mattel was paying attention to what was going on in the country. The 1950s concept of a woman was much different from the 1970s concept of a woman. We now had Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine.
I’m still struck by the astronaut outfit and how that evolved. It went from more functional to something more fanciful — what do you think was behind that?
The 1965 Barbie was on equal footing with a man’s astronaut outfit. In 1986, she had pink puffy sleeves and knee-high leg coverings, and kind of looked more like an aerobics instructor.
Do you think the 1965 version is truer to what Handler was trying to do?
I do. I quoted a woman in my book who saw the 1986 version on display at the National Air and Space Museum. She said, “This is an inspiration to children to see Barbie as an astronaut, but I do not think they do her hair like this in space.” [Laughs] To me, that’s a great quote — it’s the good and the bad. That’s why I called my book The Good, the Bad and the Barbie. It’s like two steps forward, sometimes one step back.
It’s also whimsical and fanciful — and it’s a doll, right? It’s not always necessarily intended by the company to be social commentary. It’s a doll.
“It’s a doll” is a helpful thing to keep in mind as we head into Barbie release weekend. My thanks to Tanya! For more on the history of Barbie, check out her book The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie.
PS: If you’re torn about seeing the movie, the New York Times has rounded up all of the reviews to give you a sense of what to expect — you can find that here.
And remember, if you go and wear something special, remember to send me a pic at Hello@SoManyThoughts.com. 💕
I need to know if every big sister is triggered by Barbie shoes being “a choking hazard”... even when the possible gagging little sisters are now in their 40s 🤣
I was ecstatic to see that you decided to cover this! I feel like I may be wrong, but currently I am 33 turning 34 this year and I feel like my age group are maybe some of the last few that played with Barbie as much as we did. I feel like the doll isn’t played with in the same capacity or frequency as I remember growing up. I was obsessed and had probably like 40 dolls and so many of the collectible ones that stayed in their box. I hated that with time going by people turned the doll into a body image thing when it was more about “you could be anything you want to be”, as female empowerment.
I am so excited and was over the moon when they decided to make this movie! I think the cast is fantastic and I love all the different Barbies and Kens that they casted in such diversity to ring true to what the dolls have evolved to today. Listening to a clip of Margot, I love that she says how they are all Barbie, but they all have a different personality which is great because when you try to collide the dolls with real life, it makes total sense.