Barbies shocking secrets revealed in new book…
Barbie just isn’t who we expect she is.
For practically seven a long time, Mattel has offered Barbie as a true authentic: a revolutionary and empowering different to the newborn dolls before her. In her new book, “Barbieland: The Unauthorized History” (Atria/One Signal Publishers), Tarpley Hitt offers a shocking counternarrative.
Barbie, per Hitt’s lens, was not a groundbreaking novelty. Rather, she is a low cost “knockoff” elevated by strategic advertising, 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 told The Post that the company is “aware of the book.”)
The prevailing Barbie delusion has long been that, in 1959, a businesswoman named Ruth Handler (who based toy company Mattel with her husband, Elliot) launched an 11.5-inch plastic doll to the market — and modified girlhood, the toy industry and popular culture eternally.
This doll boasted big breasts, long legs and a killer wardrobe. She wasn’t a child just like the playthings that got here before her; she was a fashion model with garments that mimicked the latest couture collections. Ruth called her Barbie after her own daughter, Barbara.
In actuality, Barbie was not the first 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 sketch in the German tabloid Bild — a blonde bimbo whose adventures in gold-digging often ended in wardrobe malfunctions. She turned a doll in 1955, offered in tobacco stands and toy shops throughout Europe. In 1958, she starred in her own live-action film — 65 years before 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 authentic she’s been offered as. Mirrorpix via Getty Images
Decades after her Barbie’s debut, Ruth admitted she noticed Lilli in Switzerland in 1956, but insisted she had the concept for a grown-up doll years before.
When Mattel engineer Jack Ryan — a former missile designer and “inappropriate 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 told him, according to the book.
By the time the German company received its American Lilli patent authorised in 1960, Mattel had already offered “nearly $1.5 million worth” of Barbie, Hitt writes.
Barbie bares a placing resemblance to the German Bild Lilli doll. SSPL via 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 just 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 ft. When Sharon Stone pitched a “Barbie” film to Mattel in the Nineteen Nineties, the actress said she was given “a lecture and an escort to the door,” according to 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 before she launched Barbie, but insisted she had the concept for a grown-up doll years before. Getty Images
As the Nineteen Nineties wore on, Mattel ramped up its petty lawsuits.
When the company sued the Europop band Aqua for its 1997 tune “Barbie Girl,” the exacerbated decide — who ruled in favor of the tune — suggested the toy company “to chill.”
“Barbieland’s” last third particulars Mattel’s decade-long battle against 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 really stolen from MGA, and Mattel was ordered to pay its rival $85 million in damages. (A later court struck down the award on “a procedural issue,” per Hitt, and in the end Mattel only had to cowl MGA’s legal charges.)
Mattel took issue with the 1997 tune “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, according Hitt, by 2018, Mattel was in dangerous form, and it needed to shed its uptight image and make money. Its new CEO claimed he wished to flip 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 means, in the end upholds the Barbie mythology: the concept that this doll modified the way in which that women noticed themselves, not as future mothers but 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.”
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