Life in plastic: The evolution and reinvention of Barbie

With Greta Gerwig’s movie set to hit the big screen this summer, the ageless plastic doll is having yet another moment. Suzanne Harrington looks at her latest reinvention

Barbie promises to be the film event of the summer.

From TikTok to haute couture, a Primark range for adults, swimwear modelled by Kardashians, and something called Kencore – bright, colour-blocked sleeveless men’s clothing personified by a bottle blond Ryan Gosling – 2023 looks to be shaping up as the year of Barbie. The hotly anticipated movie, out in July, is the culmination of the ageless plastic doll having yet another cultural moment. As its star Margot Robbie channels Barbie via Chanel at the Golden Globes, Mattel announced a new preschooler edition of the doll, My First Barbie, not long after the late Queen had a Barbie made in her honour, complete with silver hair and tiara. Only Madonna – six month’s Barbie’s senior and just as ageless – has had more reinventions.

Once upon a time, dolls were either scary porcelain-faced collectables or dull baby dolls aimed at small girls to condition them to the concept of future childcare. And then, on March 9, 1959, something radical happened. Barbie arrived fully formed, in a black and white striped swimsuit and cat’s eye sunglasses. Giraffe-proportioned, 35 pounds underweight for her height with Mae West bosoms and no vulva, she broke the dolly mould, and small girls squealed in delight at her impossible glamour. For the past 64 years, Barbie has been the queen of hot pink kitsch, and the scourge of feminism.

And now she is being made into a movie, to be released this summer. But this is no ordinary kid’s film, animating a popular toy into a popcorn event for the under-10s — this is Barbie directed by actor, writer and director Greta Gerwig, and starring Margot Robbie, who was nominated for an Oscar for her lead role in the 2017 film I, Tonya. A bleached-blond Ryan Gosling plays Barbie’s long-term plastic boyfriend, Ken.

Margot Robbie as Barbie. Picture: PA Photo/Jaap Buitendijk/© 2022 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

The trailers are mouth-watering. It starts with a spoof of 2001: A Space Odyssey, with Robbie appearing on barren landscape in Barbie’s original 1959 swimsuit, a towering glamazon surrounded by open-mouth little girls, who then smash up their baby dolls as they stare in awe at the giant Barbie. Cut to scenes of fluorescent-clad Robbie and Gosling roller-blading along a Californian beach boardwalk, all teeth and tans, skin-tight acid-hued lycra and sun-visors. It melts the kitsch-o-meter, its hyperreal aesthetic Mattel meets Met Gala. Promoting his recent action thriller The Gray Man in an Entertainment Weekly press interview, Ryan Gosling remarked, deadpan, how playing Ken was even more difficult than playing a hardened CIA mercenary: “Ken’s got no money. He’s got no job. He’s got no car. He’s got no house. You know, he’s going through some stuff.”

Greta Gerwig has mostly been keeping schtum about the Barbie movie, but the cast is rumoured to include Will Ferrell, Kate McKinnon, and America Ferrera playing various incarnations of toyland’s most enduring couple. The storyline is a fish-out-of-water comedy which involves Barbie being kicked out of Barbieland for not being perfect, and trying instead to find happiness in the human world (a plot device not dissimilar to Amy Adams’s magical princess falling through a manhole and ending up amongst the cynical humans of Manhattan in the 2007 Disney spoof Enchanted). Other than that, we will have to wait and see.

Certainly Barbie is an odd — if brilliant — choice by indie queen Gerwig. Co-written with her artistic (and life) partner, film maker Noah Baumbach, Barbie is Gerwig’s third role as director, and radically different from her previous films, which in turn were radically different from each other. 2017’s Lady Bird, starring Saoirse Ronan, was glorious indie whimsy, while 2019’s Little Women was a fresh take on a beloved costume drama. Both were Oscar nominated. “Barbie comes with a lot of baggage,” Margot Robbie said in an interview with British Vogue. “And a lot of nostalgic connections. But with that come a lot of exciting ways to attack it. People generally hear ‘Barbie’ and think, ‘I know what that movie is going to be’, and then they hear that Greta Gerwig is writing and directing it and they’re like, ‘Oh well, maybe I don’t.’” Gerwig’s other influences include Joan Didion and Patti Smith, and film makers John Huston and Mike Leigh. As an actor, she has worked with Walt Stillman, Woody Allen, Rebecca Miller, and Wes Anderson. A recent project, an adaption of Don Delillo’s novel White Noise, starred Gerwig in a lead role opposite Adam Driver. Mannered, cerebral, and tricksy, it was about as far from Barbie as you could possibly imagine. As well as I, Tonya, Margot Robbie has starred in movies directed by Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, and the Suicide Squad franchise. Again, very far from the bubblegum pink world of Barbie.

Two children's dolls, Barbie and Ken, in formal wear, stand together in front of a toy closet, December 15, 1964. Picture: Express Newspapers/Getty Images

Yet Barbie — the doll, not the film — was something of a ground breaker herself, at her initial conception. Inspired by a creation called Bild Lilli which started out as a German tabloid cartoon, the original doll was not for children, but a mildly raunchy novelty toy for adult collectors. The design was sanitised by Ann Handler, the co-founder of toy company Mattel, who named the doll after her daughter Barbara; Handler’s son, who died of Aids in 1994, was called Ken.

The backstory of Barbara Millicent Roberts precedes Gerwig by many decades. Barbie was “born” on March 9, 1959, in the fictional town of Willows, Wisconsin, where she met her boyfriend Ken Carson in 1961. Barbie’s siblings — Stacey, Skipper, Tutti, Todd, Krissy, Kelly — pop up in her life from time to time, but never steal the limelight. For years, she was synonymous with pink jeeps, going shopping, and living her best pink life, the first doll with bosoms ever marketed to children. Who adored her.

But increasingly, their parents did not. Barbie was perceived as a terrible role model, with her improbable body and obsession with clothes (she’s been dressed by everyone from Dior and Yves Saint Laurent to Karl Lagerfeld, Moschino, and Vera Wang). Realising this, Mattel remarketed her. First, they shortened her giraffe legs, and widened her hips, so that her body shape was not so unrealistically elongated. Then they added several new skin tones and eye colours, to de-Aryanise her.

Ken and Barbie

Most importantly, they made her a career role model, beyond traditional Barbie career options of flight attendant or mermaid. This culminated in a 2015 advert titled ‘Imagine the Possibilities’, which depicted little girls coaching football teams, giving university lectures, working as vets, paleontologists and business executives; but this career reinvention had been in process for some years beforehand (in 2004, Barbie ran for president). Her CV is more extensive even than Nessa’s from Gavin & Stacey — Barbie has been a pilot, doctor, dentist, surgeon, nurse, astronaut, and rock star. She’s been in the military, and has flipped burgers. She has never had children, because she prefers animals, with a menagerie of about 40 pets, including a lion and a panda. Nor has she ever married Ken.

These days, to have a Barbie doll made in your image is an honour; from pilot Amelia Earhart to boxer Nicola Adams, mathematician Katherine Johnson to artist Frida Kahlo, there is a Barbie for quite a few iconic women. However, to have indie cinema royalty like Gerwig on board is by far the most interesting collaboration of Barbie’s long, candy pink career. For excited tweens and nostalgic adults, drag queens and feminists, it promises to be the film event of the summer. See you there.