Hi There, Dollface. You Look Like Someone We Know
 
 

In her 39-year existence, Barbie has been a surgeon, a TV news reporter, a veterinarian, a fire-fighter, a paleontologist, a rock star and a presidential candidate. Nearly 20 years before Sally Ride blasted off, Barbie was already an astronaut. But now she can have the most glamourous identity of all: starting this month, Barbie can be . you.

Yes, the 11 ½ - inch icon with the impossibly long legs and gravity-defying bosom has done it once again. Or at least her makers at Mattel have. Last week the company began offering custom-designed Barbie friends online (at www.Barbie.com). Karen Caviale, 44, editor and publisher of the bimonthly Barbie Bazaar magazine, happily shelled out the $39.95, plus shipping, for a brown-eyed doll named and modeled after (surprise!!) herself. Like the thousands of others who ordered a My Design Barbie friend on her debut day, she chose the colour of her doll's skin, eyes and hair, and created a "personal profile" for her - complete with her address, birthday, hobbies and career.

My Design is only the most recent of the high-tech Barbie editions. Girls can already make clothes on fabric fed through computer printers. And various CD - ROM's let them solve fictional crimes, choose, name and dress Barbie's horses, and design and create their own fingernail decals.

The doll who started life as a blue-eyed blonde lives in an ever-more-diverse world. The 43 Barbies in the Dolls of the World collection hail from countries like Jamaica and Japan; next year's new models will be Peruvian, Austrian and Moroccan. Last year she got a new friend, Becky, who uses a wheelchair - and who now has a special elevator in the Barbie Dream House. And sorry, Ken, but Mattel is giving Barbie more celebrity friends, from M.C. Hammer to Elvis. Barbie herself has recently taken on the guise of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, and each year Mattel introduces 125 new Barbies, including a 1998 model with a butterfly tattoo on her tummy and a popular Harley - Davidson biker chick. "Barbie will change in any way that the customers will pay to see her change," says Terence Moran, a professor of culture and communication at New York University. If people would pay for a Soup Kitchen Barbie, he says, Mattel would make one.

The world's most popular toy generates $1.9 billion in annual sales for Mattel. A typical American girl between the ages of 3 and 11 owns 10 Barbies - up from only one in the early 1980s. And an estimated 500,000 adult collectors buy about 10 per cent of all the Barbies sold today. "It's like, race out to the store everyday to keep up," says Sarah Sink Eames, 45, who owns more than 5000 Barbies.

Did someone say "keeping up"? Like the hordes of women who crowd into health clubs, Barbie is getting more agile and athletic. This year Mattel introduced Olympic-skater and WNBA-player models (and a NBA player as well); next year you can get Women's World Cup soccer Barbie. Career-wise, Barbie "has done more than what 100 women could do in a lifetime," says Moran.

No matter how P.C. Barbie gets, she always keeps her slender, curvy - and controversial - figure. Next year Mattel plans to add a "Teen Scene" Barbie with a smaller bust, wider waist and slimmer hips. But Barbie watchers don't expect her basic shape to ever change, especially because it makes her an ideal mannequin for all those party dresses - and an easy target for feminists. But little girls don't necessarily want to play with chubbier, more realistic-looking dolls. They told Mattel they wanted the 1986 astronaut Barbie in knee-high boots, a miniskirt and silver mesh stockings, not in a NASA spacesuit, says designer Carol Spencer. And they always love her with Rapunzel-like locks. Mattel's all-time best seller was Totally Hair Barbie, whose tresses flowed from her head to her toes. Says Mattel's Lisa McKendall: "It's about fantasy and dreaming." And the fun of seeing ourselves in plastic perfection.

Karen Springen
From Newsweek 2000 Millennium notebook .