Barbie has been in vogue since 1959.
Since her toy store debut, the doll has adapted to each era’s fashion standards, strived to hold over 200 careers and impersonated just as many celebrities. The buzz around Greta Gerwig’s upcoming film “Barbie” proves the doll’s plastic grip on pop culture is as firm as ever.
TODAY.com spoke with Carol Spencer, 90, who was one of Mattel’s chief Barbie designers from 1963 to 1998, about Barbie’s evolution and how the doll has managed to stay relevant.
A graduate of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Spencer began working for Mattel just four years after Barbie’s debut. She retired in 1998 after 35 years working at Mattel.
“I was so at home with Barbie that I just stayed, because I loved her so much, and I loved doing the work,” Spencer says of her time at the company.
Since then, Spencer’s Barbie designs have been featured in museum exhibits and fashion history books. Spencer herself wrote about her experience with Mattel in her 2019 memoir “Dressing Barbie: A Celebration of the Clothes that Made America’s Favorite Doll and the Incredible Woman Behind Them.”
Barbie’s origin story
As the story goes, Mattel cofounder Ruth Handler was inspired to create Barbie when she saw a Bild Lilli doll, a gag gift based on a German comic strip character, while on vacation in Europe, per PBS. Inspired by Bild Lilli, Handler created Barbara “Barbie” Millicent Roberts, a teenage fashion model doll marketed for children.
Handler partially based Barbie on her own daughter, Barbara, who had wanted an older doll to play with, rather than the baby dolls common at the time.
According to Spencer, toy buyers were initially unconvinced that the Barbie doll would sell, but children immediately adored Barbie. The first iteration of Barbie debuted in 1959 wearing a chic striped swimsuit and sporting a perky blond ponytail.
The doll immediately took the toy world by storm,…
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