Culture | Exhibitions It is perhaps unfortunate timing that this retrospective of everyone’s favourite problematic toy has come a year after last summer’s Barbie-core blitz . Marking the 65th anniversary of Mattel’s premiere product, the show has been three years in the planning, which was before Greta Gerwig ’s box office smash was announced. Still, 12 months on are we still bothered about the doll? The answer is yes, and no.
Little girls remain entranced. My seven-year-old daughter was certainly radicalised by the endless promotion and has since acquired an ambulance, doctor Barbie and wheelchair Ken. I’ve lost count of the Barbie-themed birthday parties friends with children have attended over the past year.
Barbie-core reverberates about us, as it has for the past six decades. This exhibition – which positions itself as looking at “the design history of the brand” – gives a thorough backstory of the doll and her accoutrements via a fun, buzzy set; in, of course, that jarring, tangy, headache inducing pink. It opens, as the film does, with the original 1959 Barbie in her black and white swimsuit, the brainchild of Ruth Handler, who headed up Mattel’s sales and marketing division while her husband Elliot running research and design.
There is grainy footage of the Japanese factory line from which she was born. Along one wall runs Mattel’s potted history of highlights: 1961, Ken is born; 1968, Christie, the first black friend of Barbie; 1992, Barbie “r.
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