Abstract
In 2016, Mattel released a Fashionistas Barbie line with diverse skin tones, hair styles, body shapes, and fashion-forward attire. The line’s inclusion of a “curvy” body type made international headlines, including a Time magazine cover featuring a backlit curvy Barbie and the words: “‘Now can we stop talking about my body?’ What Barbie’s new shape says about American beauty.” This chapter examines factors precipitating the Fashionistas’ release, including decades of scholarship concerning Barbie and girls’ body images; years of declining Barbie sales; and successful indie-brands dolls (like Lottie and Lammily) with more realistic body shapes. Informed by feminist scholarship, this chapter interrogates and problematizes Mattel’s marketing and reception surrounding the Fashionistas’ launch, including Mattel’s emphasis on body type and de-emphasis on the line’s racial and ethnic diversity; Mattel’s reliance upon public relations tactics to appeal to reluctant parents; and the press’ mix of praise for Mattel’s promotion of body positivity, criticisms that Mattel overstated the change represented by curvy Barbie’s still-slender, U.S.-size-four body type, and condemnation of Mattel for allegedly pandering to liberals and feminists to create a doll that conservative critics perceived as fat.
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Notes
- 1.
According to my search of ProQuest’s databases, in a one-week period following Mattel’s January 28, 2016 press release about Barbie’s “three new body types,” 495 articles in newspapers, magazines, wire feeds, and other sources discussed Mattel’s Barbie. Of those, 419 discussed Barbie’s body; 327 specifically discussed “curvy Barbie;” and 32 used the phrase “curvy Barbie” in their headlines.
- 2.
To better understand 3- to 10-year-old girls’ perceptions of dolls with differing body shapes, Harriger et al. (2019) stripped down four light-skinned Barbie dolls (original, curvy, petite, and tall); dressed them in identical bikinis; and removed their original heads, replacing them with identical (blonde) heads from other Barbie dolls. The researchers thus eliminated as confounding variables the fashionable clothing, accessories, hairstyles, and makeup that characterize the Fashionistas line. In observing Mattel’s consumer research, Dockterman (2016a) noted that those variables did prompt girls to choose to play with curvy Barbie dolls, especially a blue-haired one, even though they regarded them as fat. In my assessment, the Harriger et al. study has important implications for girls’ body type biases, but playing with altered and reconfigured dolls tells us little about the girls’ attitudes towards the Fashionistas brand or their willingness to play with actual Barbie dolls that have been unaltered by researchers for use in an experimental setting.
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Hains, R.C. (2021). The Politics of Barbie’s Curvy New Body: Marketing Mattel’s Fashionistas Line. In: Hains, R.C., Jennings, N.A. (eds) The Marketing of Children’s Toys. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62881-9_14
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