Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [3]
And finally, thanks to Glenn Bozarth and Donna Gibbs at Mattel, who deigned to give me access, and to all the present and former Mattel employees who told their stories. Without them, Barbie's synthetic tapestry would have been vastly less rich.
In 2004, with the reissue of Forever Barbie, I owe thanks to yet more people. To George Gibson, my publisher, and Eric Simonoff, my agent, for continuing to believe in this book. To my friends Brenda Potter and Michael Sandier, who, with Susan Brodsky and Chris Thalken, organized an eye-opening focus group. To Emma Thalken, Tatjana Asia, and Brittany Campbell for their surprising insights into Barbie's evolving identity. To the Guerilla Girls, for resuscitating interest in the Lilli doll. And to Christine Steiner for those exhausting requisites for writerly production—attention and support.
Lily understood that beauty is only the raw material of conquest and that to convert it to success, other arts are required. She knew that to betray any sense of superiority was a subtler form of the stupidity her mother denounced, and it did not take her long to learn that a beauty needs more tact than the possessor of an average set of features.
—EDITH WHARTON, The House of Mirth
The daughter is for the mother at once her double and another person . . . she saddles her child with her own destiny: a way of proudly laying claim to her own femininity and also a way of revenging herself for it. The same process is to be found in pederasts, drug addicts, in all who at once take pride in belonging to a certain confraternity and feel humiliated by the association.
—SlMONE DE BEAUVOIR, The Second Sex
No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling.
—KENNETH CLARK, The Nude
CHAPTER ONE
WHO IS BARBIE, ANYWAY ?
The theme of the convention was "Wedding Dreams," and appropriately it was held in Niagara Falls, the honeymoon capital, a setting of fierce natural beauty pimpled with fast-food joints and tawdry motels. The delegates were not newlyweds who had come to cuddle aboard the Maid of the Mist, poignantly hopeful that their union, unlike half of all American marriages, would last. They were not children, who had come to goggle at the cataract over which dozens of cartoon characters had plunged in barrels and miraculously survived. Nor were they shoppers attracted by Niagara's other big draw—the Factory Outlet Mall—where such brand names as Danskin and Benetton, Reebok and Burberrys, Mikasa and Revere Ware could be purchased for as much as 70 percent off retail.
They were, however, consumers, many of whom had been taught a style of consumption by the very object they were convening to celebrate. They had fled the turquoise sky and the outdoor pagentry for the dim, cramped ballroom of the Radisson Hotel. There were hundreds of them: southern ladies in creaseless pant suits dragging befuddled Rotary Club-member husbands; women in T-shirts from Saskatoon and Pittsburgh; stylish young men from Manhattan and West Hollywood. There were housewives and professional women; single people, married people, severely corpulent people, and bony, gangling people. A thirtysomething female from Tyler, Texas, volunteered that she had the same measurements as Twiggy, except that she was one inch wider in the hips. There were people from Austria and Guadeloupe and Scotland. Considering the purpose of the gathering, there were surprisingly few blond people.
These were delegates to the 1992 Barbie-doll collectors' convention, a