The History Of Barbie

She’s got blonde hair, blue eyes, a small waist, and long legs. She’s perfection in every sense. One day she’s a doctor, the next a model. Her level of recognition is among the likes of Mickey Mouse and Elvis. However, unlike Elvis, she never ages. At the age of 48 she is as much of a teenager as she was in 1958. She’s perhaps one of the most popular beings in the world, well despite the fact that you have to buy her friends. Her name is Barbara Millicent Roberts, but you can just call her Barbie.

Barbie is possibly one of the biggest icons of the past 50 years. She has grown to represent a culture and more than one generation. But, who exactly is Barbie? To many she is just a popular plaything for girls, and others, a sort of unattainable goal. Everyone seems to have an view on her, but as everyone knows you need to know a bit about something in order to form an adequate opinion. So today I will supply you with the information and the views on Barbie so perhaps you, yourself can make your own judgment on her. So lets put on our comfortable pink pumps, and jump into our pink corvette and first, take a closer look Barbie, next look at the views that people have about her, and finally, take a tiny peek at what is expected for her future.

Barbie made her first debut at the American Toy Fair in New York City in 1959. She was an eleven and a half inch doll with a pony tail and curled bangs, black and white bathing suit, open-toed high heels, sunglasses, earrings, and a sly sideways glance. She was intended as a teenage fashion model and was the first doll on the market of an older age. Despite the fact that buyers at the fair weren’t impressed with the doll she set sale records for Mattel in the market selling 351,000 dolls in her first year. It seems that an older doll was exactly what girls wanted. This is also what Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler, noticed in her daughter. Barbara, Barbie’s namesake, and her girlfriends always seemed to enjoy playing with dolls of an older age rather than baby dolls. Since the only adult dolls were made of paper or cardboard, Handler realized the need for a three-dimensional version. Ruth found just such doll on a trip to Germany with her daughter. Her name was Lilli. She was a doll based on the character from a popular comic strip from the magazine, “die Bild-Zeitung.” This doll was originally first marketed to adult men in bars and tobacco shops as a type of pornographic gag gift. Handler bought three Lilli dolls and gave one to her daughter and brought the other two back to Mattel. After some changes to the doll Lilli came back as the new and improved Barbie, a vision of purity and innocence.