Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [82]
"I needed [the characters] to wear schlocko but hip clothes," she told me. And the illustrated book jogged her memory: there on its pages were herself and her friends—the "hood" or roughneck crowd, as she describes them. Barbie's pre-1967 face brought back her own grooming ritual—the heavy black liner and "blue stuff" around the eyes, the white lipstick—a look that was defiant in its knowing garishness. It was also democratic: "Anyone could get miniskirts and fishnet stockings and see-through plastic raincoats; they weren't like the high-class fashions of today, which really are impossible to afford. There was always a cheap ripoff at Zody's or White Front."
In Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, Stephen Bayley tells us that "nothing is as crass and vulgar as instant classification according to hairstyle, clothing and footwear, yet it is . . . a cruelly accurate analytical form." Because Barbie is a construct of class—as well as a construct of gender— this crass, vulgar, and accurate investigation cannot be avoided. "When it comes to the meaning of things, there are no more powerful transmitters than clothes, those quasi-functional devices which, like an inverted fig, put the heart of the matter in front of the skin," Bayley writes. Yet powerful though the transmissions may be, many Americans deliberately ignore them.
If you want to make an American twitch nervously and avoid eye contact, raise the issue of social class. To do this is to invite being misunderstood. One is perceived as either a wild-eyed socialist, directing middle-class attention to the exploited classes beneath it, or an anxious snob, sneering at others to retain a hold on one's own tenuous position. When forced to acknowledge class differences, Americans often argue that this country has infinite class mobility, which is, of course, hyperbolic—for everyone except Barbie. Barbie can not only ascend the social ladder, she can occupy several classes at once.
In the early sixties, Barbie was positioned as a high school baton twirler and prom queen. Yet when Jacqueline Kennedy was in the White House— and the middle class briefly stopped denying the existence of a class above it—Barbie's trunk contained all she would need for a term at Mrs. Kennedy's former boarding school in Farmington, Connecticut. In the hierarchy of class, Barbie had duel citizenship, a status she made even murkier when she donned the flashy, synthetic clothes that inspired Ciment.
To chart Barbie's course as a social mountaineer, we will have to define her peaks and valleys. Sociologists usually carve society into five classes: upper, upper-middle, middle, lower-middle, and lower. In Class, his facetious investigation into social status, however, Paul Fussell advances a more nuanced palate. It has nine classes: top-out-of-sight (the Forbes four hundred), upper, upper-middle, middle, high-proletarian, mid-proletarian, low-proletarian, destitute, and bottom-out-of-sight (the homeless). While destitute and bottom-out-of-sight are virtually irrelevant to Barbie, her lifestyle is a sort of Chutes and Ladders game among the other seven.
According to Fussell's guidelines. Barbie began a downward trajectory in 1977. Her "SuperStar" face, with its vapid grin, sent her plummeting. "You'll notice prole women smile more, and smile wider, than those of the middle and upper classes," Fussell writes. "They're enmeshed in the 'have a nice day culture' and are busy effusing a defensive optimism." Likewise, when Barbie's miniature wool suits gave way to polyester dresses, she sank. "All synthetic fibers are prole," he writes, "partly because they're cheaper than natural ones, partly because they're not archaic, and partly because they're entirely uniform and hence boring."
Fussell's tone is one of bemused detachment, a defense against accusations that