Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [103]
Meredig claims to have based Happy on the Venus de Milo, but her classical allusion masks an ignorance of the historical relationship between the sculpted figure and its drapery. The Venus, as Hollander points out, may have ended up armless by chance, but she was "legless by design"—and without the heavy folds obscuring her stumpy legs, even her contemporaries would have thought her dowdy. By contrast, Charlotte Johnson, Barbie's first dress designer, understood the historical interdependence between the figure and its drapery. She also understood scale: When you put human-scale fabric on an object that is one-sixth human size, a multilayered cloth waistband is going to protrude like a truck tire around a human tummy. The effect would be the same as draping a human model in fabric made of threads that were the thickness of the model's fingers.
Because fabric of a proportionally diminished gauge could not be woven on existing looms, something else had to be pared down—and that something was Barbie's figure. One wonders how Meredig could have failed to notice the glaring incongruity between the scale of human-sized cloth and that of its miniature wearer. Or did Meredig so obsess on the naked doll that she forgot that girls were supposed to dress it?
Even in the raw, however, Happy leaves much to be desired. She is so cheaply manufactured that she makes Barbie look like an heirloom. When I handled an actual Happy doll, the first thing I noticed were not its measurements ("36-27-38" to a fashion doll's "36-18-33," Meredig's press materials said), but its receding hairline. Its hair sprang out of its head in widely scattered clumps, as if its balding pate, like that of a desperate middle-aged man, had been reforested with plugs. Then there was the hair's creepy texture. Whatever else one may say about Barbie, her hair feels like hair. It is made out of Kanekalon, a fiber used for human wigs, which Mattel designer Joe Cannizzaro arranged to have extruded in lengths long enough to meet the requirements of the sewing machines used on doll heads.
In appealing to educated, aesthetically minded parents concerned about body image, Meredig seemingly forgot how snobbish such parents can be about cheesy toys. Even Roland Barthes, who rhapsodized about plastic's versatility, turned up his nose at plastic playthings. Such toys, he said, lack "the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch" that their wooden counterparts possess—fancy words to express a plain old "prejudice" against them, suggests psychologist and Toys as Culture author Brian Sutton-Smith.
Nor is it as if Happy had no impact on Barbie. Ever watchful of its competitors, Mattel has included some very Happy-esque modifications on the dolls in its 1994 line. These include Gymnast Barbie, a doll with flat feet (like Happy's) that can stand without support, and Bedtime Barbie, a stuffed doll with a plastic head that I predict will be a favorite with mothers. Far from being a sexpot with a wardrobe from Victoria's Secret, Bedtime Barbie wears a frowzy flannel housecoat and fuzzy slippers. She is Slattern Barbie, Cellulite Barbie—a doll with thick ankles, sagging breasts, and squishy thighs—as unthreatening to Mom as Roseanne Arnold before her surgery.
But even if Meredig had produced an aesthetically pleasing doll—one that didn't