Doll-A-Day 2019 #63: Barbie's '60th' Week: Bubble Cut Barbie

  As most of you will know, this year is Barbie's 60th birthday. She debuted at Toy Fair on March 9th,1959. She looks pretty good for her age. In fact, she looks a lot younger than she did to begin with! Is it just me, or did Barbie the Teenage Fashion Model start out looking like a middle aged woman? Anyway, for the next 7 days, leading up to March 9th, we'll be looking at some vintage Barbies. Today's Barbie is the Bubble Cut.

Barbie runs up a little something for her Hope Chest. (You young people can find out what a Hope Chest was HERE.)

Barbie started out with a ponytail. There were several slightly varied versions of the ponytail Barbie, before she was given a new hairstyle: the bubble cut.  The bubble cut was so called due to it's round shape.
 

Sorry about the green ear.

  I have a rant to do here. I'm getting really tired of hearing how Ruth Handler, one of the founders of Mattel, 'invented' Barbie. That's blatantly untrue.
 

She's wearing the 1965 Barbie fashion, Student Teacher.

Barbie began life in 1952,as a cartoon about a woman called Lili, created by Reinhard Beuthien for the German tabloid 'Bild'. Lili's dialogue was suggestive, and she appeared in various states of undress or suggestive clothing. Lili was well liked by the adult readers of Bild.

  Around 1953 Bild asked Max Weissbrodt of the toy company O&M Hausser to produce  a Lili doll. Hausser made the first prototype Lili doll. She was marketed mainly to men, as a novelty gift. She had molded shoes, bee stung lips, and a curl on her forehead...and looked amazingly similar to Barbie. The doll became very popular, eventually even selling to children. She had a wardrobe and later furniture and room settings. Lili dolls were sold in other European countries. There was an attempt to market her in Spain, but the country was very conservative at the time and the doll was unpopular, eventually being taken off the market.

   In the 50's Ruth Handler visited Hamburg and discovered the Lili doll. She acquired the rights, and Mattel produced the Barbie doll. That's very different from the official Mattel story these days. In an article dated January of this year, Ruth Handler is credited with 'inventing' Barbie. Mattel's Director of Global Brand Marketing for Barbie, Nathan Baynard, was quoted as saying, "Her daughter Barbara was limited in the choices of her toys -- the only ones were baby dolls."  Which of course, is strictly not true. There had always been dolls that weren't 'baby dolls'. In the decade or more preceding Barbie there had been dolls like Ideal's Miss Revlon and Toni, Cosmopolitan's Ginger, Vogue's Jill, Uneeda's Suzette and Dollikin, and Madame Alexander's Cissy. These were dolls with mature figures, high heels and extensive wardrobes of fashionable clothing, dolls with lingerie, painted fingernails, and hair that could be curled and set. These were not 'baby' dolls. Years ago I remember reading an article in which Ruth Handler stated that her 'inspiration' for Barbie had been her daughter's sophisticated paper dolls, with their fashionable clothes. She wanted to come up with an actual doll like that that her daughter could play with. Which version of the story are we going with here?

  Baynard also stated, "The only role she (Barbara) could imagine through that play was caregiver, mother," and Handler's son, Ken, "could imagine being an astronaut, cowboy, pilot, surgeon." Ok, well, there are other roles that could be played there, like doctor for one thing. Apart from that, there is the point that Ken was playing astronaut, cowboy, pilot, and surgeon without the help of a doll. What was stopping Barbara from doing that? (Other than her mother thinking Barbara could only act those things out with the aid of a doll because she was a girl?)

Baynard further claimed that the whole original point of Barbie was to teach girls, "that they had choices, that they could be anything. In 1959, it was a radical idea!" What a lot of bull! Handler's earlier claim that she came up with Barbie so her daughter could play with a doll with a massive fashionable wardrobe without the annoying paper clothes continually falling off seems to have been turned into a whole new tale meant to impress the mothers of today. And as far as Barbie being made 'to teach girls...that they could be anything', Barbie was specifically called 'Barbie, Teenage Fashion Model'. She already was something. I will concede that Barbie later became other things. But she did begin her run as a teenage fashion model.

    In the same article Barbie designer Carlyle Nuera explained why Barbie was created with her massive chest and tiny waist with this story, "In 1959, her body structure was exaggerated to match the aesthetics of the time and the fabric available." Uh.NO. Her body structure was exaggerated to appeal to men in suggestive German cartoons. You know, even if Barbie was made under the guidelines of what a woman should look like according to the 1950's, that was THAT time. You don't have to try to lie about it and make up for it now. Just be better from now on and be in line with the opinions of the current society. Mattel is rewriting the whole story of Barbie in an attempt to make her look more politically correct, and it really annoys me. I hate lies.

  For the record, I was never concerned that my daughters would think they had to look like a Barbie doll. I never thought it myself either. It's a good thing I didn't ever think I had to look like my dolls, since I had a predilection, (and still do!), for goofy looking and sad faced dolls. Most kids don't want to play with unattractive dolls. It's human nature to be attracted to attractive things and people. The idea of what is attractive is subjective anyway, so not everybody is going to find Barbie's figure appealing. (My dad, for example, would have preferred a bigger bottom and heavier legs. No accounting for tastes.)

  Interestingly, Weissbrodt later sold the rights for the Lili doll to Louis Marx and Company, who used them to produce Miss Seventeen and Miss Marlene dolls. Marx later tried to sue Mattel over the license. You can read the story in detail HERE. They didn't win, of course, and Barbie continued on to turn 60 this month.

 We'll see another version of her tomorrow.