Barbie’s shocking secrets revealed in new book – Business News
Barbie isn’t who we expect she is.
For practically seven many years, Mattel has bought Barbie as a true unique: a revolutionary and empowering various to the infant dolls earlier than her. In her new book, “Barbieland: The Unauthorized History” (Atria/One Signal Publishers), Tarpley Hitt offers a stunning counternarrative.
Barbie, per Hitt’s lens, was not a groundbreaking novelty. Rather, she is a low-cost “knockoff” elevated by strategic advertising and marketing, exploitation, bullying, backstabbing and espionage.
A new book is full of shocking allegations associated to Barbie and Mattel.
“Mattel had spent years obscuring Barbie’s backstory,” the creator writes. (A Mattel spokesperson informed The Post that the company is “aware of the book.”)
The prevailing Barbie fable has long been that, in 1959, a businesswoman named Ruth Handler (who based toy company Mattel together with her husband, Elliot) launched an 11.5-inch plastic doll to the market — and adjusted girlhood, the toy industry and popular culture ceaselessly.
This doll boasted massive breasts, long legs and a killer wardrobe. She wasn’t a child just like the playthings that got here earlier than her; she was a fashion model with garments that mimicked the most recent couture collections. Ruth referred to as her Barbie after her own daughter, Barbara.
In actuality, Barbie was not the primary grownup doll. There have been others, Hitt notes. And one, the German dolly Bild Lilli, had a a lot greater affect on Barbie’s creation than Ruth would ever admit.
Lilli began life as a ribald caricature in the German tabloid Bild — a blonde bimbo whose adventures in gold-digging typically ended in wardrobe malfunctions. She turned a doll in 1955, bought in tobacco stands and toy shops all through Europe. In 1958, she starred in her own live-action film — 65 years earlier than actress/producer Margot Robbie and director Greta Gerwig introduced “Barbie” to the silver screen.
The book claims that the leggy doll isn’t the revolutionary unique she’s been bought as. Mirrorpix through Getty Images
Decades after her Barbie’s debut, Ruth admitted she noticed Lilli in Switzerland in 1956, however insisted she had the concept for a grown-up doll years earlier than.
When Mattel engineer Jack Ryan — a former missile designer and “sexual libertine” who would later patent Barbie’s hips — went to take a look at some factories for Japan, Ruth allegedly caught a Lilli doll into his briefcase. “See if you can get this copied,” she informed him, in keeping with the book.
By the time the German company received its American Lilli patent authorised in 1960, Mattel had already bought “nearly $1.5 million worth” of Barbie, Hitt writes.
Barbie bares a hanging resemblance to the German Bild Lilli doll. SSPL through Getty Images
Eventually, Mattel purchased the worldwide rights to the Lilli doll — and buried her. “Investigations into Lilli had a habit of disappearing from the public record,” Hitt claims.
It wasn’t simply Barbie’s origin story that Mattel tried to control. When the company commissioned an “Art of Barbie” espresso desk book in 1994, it nixed photographer Nancy Burson’s contribution: an “aged” Barbie with crow’s toes. When Sharon Stone pitched a “Barbie” film to Mattel in the Nineties, the actress mentioned she was given “a lecture and an escort to the door,” in keeping with Hitt.
“For Mattel to tolerate a reproduction of Barbie it had to be, as [one publisher] put it, ‘as identical to the doll as possible’” she writes. “… Perfect, not only in its aesthetic faithfulness to the doll itself, but existentially: Barbie could not be flawed.”
Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler admitted that she had seen Lilli in Switzerland a few years earlier than she launched Barbie, however insisted she had the concept for a grown-up doll years earlier than. Getty Images
As the Nineties wore on, Mattel ramped up its petty lawsuits.
When the company sued the Europop band Aqua for its 1997 music “Barbie Girl,” the exacerbated choose — who ruled in favor of the music — suggested the toy company “to chill.”
“Barbieland’s” final third particulars Mattel’s decade-long battle towards Bratz, MGA’s widespread line of teen fashion dolls that debuted in 2001 — claiming that a Barbie designer had come up with the concept at Mattel. MGA then alleged that Mattel had spied on workers and maintained a “long-running corporate espionage operation” to steal commerce secrets. One of these spies took the stand, recalling utilizing pretend names and business playing cards to sneak into rivals’ showrooms and reporting his findings back to Mattel. The jury, on appeal, discovered that Mattel had truly stolen from MGA, and Mattel was ordered to pay its rival $85 million in damages. (A later court docket struck down the award on “a procedural issue,” per Hitt, and in the tip Mattel solely needed to cowl MGA’s legal charges.)
Mattel took challenge with the 1997 music “Barbie Girl” by the Europop band Aqua. Aqua
It’s astonishing that Mattel allowed Gerwig to make a film that considerably skewers the doll’s image. In the 2023 “Barbie” movie, the titular doll, performed by the lissome Robbie, goes into an existential spiral after she spots cellulite on her leg.
But, in accordance Hitt, by 2018, Mattel was in unhealthy form, and it needed to shed its uptight image and make money. Its new CEO claimed he wished to show Mattel into an IP-driven company. “He understood that the screen was the medium on which Barbie’s future would be made,” she writes.
Margot Robbie portrayed the doll in the 2023 film “Barbie,” directed by Greta Gerwig. ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
The film, in its own cheeky manner, finally upholds the Barbie mythology: the concept that this doll modified the way in which that women noticed themselves, not as future mothers however future designers, adventurers, businesswomen, even presidents.
Barbie “had become not just a child’s accessory but a symbol, as synonymous with American consumerism as the Golden Arches and French fries,” Hitt writes. “She was ‘forever,’ like diamonds or microplastics.”
