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bubble skirts that Lacroix introduced in 1987 ("for women who like to 'dress up like little girls,' " he says) and the New Look that Christian Dior fobbed off on women forty years earlier. Both were fussy, ruffly, waist-cinched fashions that exaggerated female curves to the point of caricature and looked goofy on all but the adolescent and acutely svelte. Both came after a period of relative sartorial sanity: the dull but practical "Dress for Success" formula John Molloy coded in the seventies, and the dress-for-comfort system women coded for themselves during World War II. Both also followed a time when women had enjoyed opportunities for professional realization—when male soldiers returned from the war, women who had taken the men's jobs gave them back; just as, when unemployment soared after the 1987 stock market crash, women were urged through "mommy-track" propaganda to relinquish limited spots in the workforce to men.

Flight Time Barbie's Day-to-Night transformation parallels the fashion industry's late-eighties campaign to convince mature career women that it would be in their professional interest to dress like teenage cupcakes. The doll follows the established strategy of disguising her cross-gender strivings through exposure, except that she reveals more flesh than she did in 1985. It is as if the masculinizing necktie she wears in the cockpit is strangling her, and she must rip it off, the way that Mademoiselle in 1987 instructed fashion votaries to say "Bye-bye" to that relic of Molloyism, "the little bow tie." Or perhaps her excesses have another source: certainly the idea of a cockpit, where "cock" is a colloquialism for the penis, could have exacerbated her homeovestite panic, pushing her over the sartorial edge.

To be sure, Barbie is a toy, and in market research sessions, as Barbie's first advertising copywriter Cy Schneider has pointed out, children, presented with choices that can be characterized as "tasteful, gaudy, gaudier, or gaudiest," invariably choose "gaudiest." But Barbie is also a reflection of her times—or a reflection of how market researchers and professional prognosticators interpret them. And perhaps therein lies the paradox. Mattel hangs on every prediction of such national surveys as the Yankelovich Youth Monitor, as well as its own market research. And it is not alone in this: few major companies make a move without consulting trained, high-tech prophets, even though futurists themselves acknowledge that the very act of anticipating the marketplace can influence it.

"When I as a futurist share our assumptions with the wide bunch of CEOs who are our clients, it's halfway to a self-fulfilling prophecy," explains Laurel Cutler, worldwide director of marketing planning for Foote Cone Belding, Inc., and vice chairman of FCB Leber Katz, who has been spotting trends for corporations for the last twenty-five years. "Because if you get enough people in enough different places thinking along the same lines, they start reinforcing each other and giving each other the support to proceed along those lines. There's one company that makes a fortune from predicting what the 'in' colors will be—in fashion, paint, wallpaper, and so on. But if you say, 'red, orange, and russet' to enough people in enough places early on—well, you see what I mean by halfway to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Although women's sphere did contract in the late eighties, Barbie was not long bound by its constraints. Mattel had factories and branches all over the world, and by 1989, the world was on the verge of a radical change. When the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, Barbie, that coruscating cheerleader of consumption, gained a new mission. Capitalism had defeated its frumpy totalitarian foe. Czechs and Magyars, Poles and Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Romanians, Ukrainians—all the citizens of the former Soviet bloc—were starved for style. They craved a model of free-market femininity, and Mattel moved in 1991 to provide them with one. As twilight fell on the Reagan decade, Barbie's star rose in the East.

CHAPTER SEVEN