Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [49]
Barbie finally reflected, in a slightly skewed looking glass, the progress racial and ethnic minorities had made during the seventies. Styled by Kitty Black Perkins, an African-American designer whom Mattel hired in 1975, Black Barbie made her debut in 1980. Barbie had had black friends since the late sixties, but by 1979, Mattel determined that America was ready for the dream girl herself to be of color. Because the new doll was likely to be scrutinized, Mattel fashioned her with sensitivity: her hair is short and realistically textured; her face, if not aggressively non-Caucasian, is at least different from blond Barbie's; and her dress, while corporate, is livened up with jewelry evocative of African sculpture.
Hispanic Barbie, who appeared the same year, is another story. Decked out in a peasant blouse, a two-tiered skirt, and a mantilla, the doll looks like a refugee from an amateur production of Carmen; she even has a rose pinned at her neck. Mattel's designers could hardly be unacquainted with Hispanics: there are millions in southern California, and some even work for the company. Yet rather than dress her in an authentic folk costume or normal clothes, Mattel clad her in what it labeled "fiesta-style"—an adjective one expects to find imprinted on a plastic bag of tortilla chips.
"Little Hispanic girls can now play with their very own Barbie," the catalogue reads, and the contrast between the company's noble intentions—the box was printed in English and Spanish—and its actual product is puzzling. Unlike Mattel's international Barbies, aimed at adult collectors for whom authenticity is not a high priority, this doll was meant for real children, whose parents must, to a degree, have felt patronized by it.
The complexities of marketing dolls of color—as well as the way mainstream toy companies have interpreted ethnicity over time—will be examined later. But even in their imperfect executions, the mere existence of Black Barbie and Hispanic Barbie in 1980 was a landmark. Like the coronation of Vanessa Williams as Miss America in 1983, the dolls commented on the evolution of popular taste. Slowly (with the speed of a glacier, critics might say), standards of so-called beauty were changing.
Besides the country's collective twist to the right, Barbie benefited from another trend. Baby boomers who had played with the original doll were beginning to breed, and those who had once enjoyed Barbie gave her to their daughters, often when they were as young as two years old. This led to the invention in 1981 of My First Barbie, which was intended to be easier to dress. It had straight arms and rounded hands—some collectors refer to them scornfully as "fins"—since the doll's original sharp fingers could stab out a toddler's eye.
By 1983, the titles of Barbie's outfits began to lose the self-refer-entiality that had characterized them since the late sixties. It was safe to name them for activities again: "Holiday Hostess," "Horseback ridin'," "Ski party!" There was no danger Barbie would wear these to, say, demonstrate for the Equal Rights Amendment, which, by 1980, had failed. Shoppers who had used their charge cards surreptitiously in the seventies came out of the closet; far from requiring a place to hide, they needed the storage space. It was deja vu time at Mattel. The company produced a Dream Store reminiscent of Barbie's 1963 Fashion Shop and a Barbie Loves McDonald's plastic hamburger stand, which, among other things, heightened brand recognition among preschoolers.
Eating was a key part of the eighties ethos; the decade's emblematic fauna—young urban professionals—lived to consume. True, fast-food rarely passed between their lips. They preferred pricy, affected