Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [130]
Reinvention is a constant in Barbie's life, but at Mattel as in Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun. The 1993 Western Stampin' Barbie is a direct knockoff of the 1981 Western Barbie, except that the earlier model's eye winked. Similarly, Barbie has been pushing homeovestism—the masking of one's cross-gender strivings by decking oneself out like a parody of one's own gender—in slightly different guises for a decade. Modeled on the mid-eighties Day-to-Night Barbie, the current "We Girls Can Do Anything" Career Collection dolls are packaged with implicitly "masculine" daytime work outfits and absurd caricatures of "feminine" evening dresses. The contrast, for instance, between the 1993 Police Officer Barbie's work garb—a natty indigo uniform with trousers, a necktie, and a long phallic flashlight—and her "glittery" evening frock—a gilded bustier with a gold-flecked tutu—is particularly striking. No one but a drag queen—or a homeovestite—would be caught dead in it.
In response to tough new environmental laws in Europe, however, Barbie's chemical composition, while still plastic, has changed. It is no longer exclusively polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which, when incinerated, produces hydrochloric acid, linked to acid rain. The doll's arms are made from ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA), its torso from acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS), and its bend-leg armature from polypropylene. Only its outer legs remain PVC—but this, too, is a different formula from that of the early dolls. In the late eighties, the German government passed a law restricting the amount of plasticizer (a softening agent) permitted in PVC. German consumer watchdogs worried that if a child accidentally swallowed a toy made of PVC, his or her stomach acid would extract its plasticizer, leaving behind a hard, dangerous object.
"We tried to argue with them by conducting tests where we had plasti-cized PVC Barbie shoes tied on a tether fed to pigs," explained Maki Papavasiliou, Mattel's vice president of corporate environmental affairs. "For weeks on end they would fish them out and weigh them to demonstrate that there was no weight loss—no plasticizer loss." But the Germans remained unconvinced, so Mattel complied with the law, making Barbie's legs less flexible than they used to be.
Mattel has also adapted its packaging to comply with European regulations. The display windows in Barbie's European boxes are no longer made of PVC, and the company has made a commitment to use more recycled materials. The floor, in fact, in Barbie's three-story town house is liiade of postconsumer recycled ABS.
Although Barbie wasn't sold in Europe until the early sixties, Germany and France are now among Mattel's most important markets. Likewise, Mattel has recently begun selling Barbies in Japan, instead of issuing Barbie-like teen fashion dolls through a Japanese franchise. Barbie kicked off her new internationalism in 1990 with the "Barbie Summit," a kiddie United Nations that took place at New York's Waldorf-Astoria. Its slogan, in English, was "One Child/One World," which was emblazoned in several languages on the official Summit doll's carton. But one had to question Mattel's phrasing. The translations were not always literal—the German version, for instance, was "Fine Welt fur alle Kinder"—literally "One world for all the children." Yet the Italian translation needlessly preserved the English construction. Thus "Un bimbo/un mondo" was boldly displayed on the box.
Despite its economic problems, Eastern Europe is a new frontier for Barbie. Children in Moscow clamor for the doll, and often have to settle for stout Russian knock-offs with large feet,