Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [88]
Seduced by California, to which 1 had not returned since I left for college, and sucked into Barbie's tiny world, I began to see a dignity in Barbie's houses. With a little imagination, one could discern the influence of the Art & Architecture Case Study Houses—bold, modernist designs from the likes of Pierre Koenig, Craig Ellwood, Charles and Ray Eames—that sprang up in California from 1945 until the early sixties. Barbie's original Dream House, although a jumble of colors, is clean and simple in design—pared down by virtue of its function, which involved folding up into a portable carrying case.
Barbie's 1964 Go-Together plastic furniture also had a sort of Danish modern, psychiatrist's-office look to it; but her revamped 1964 Dream House abandoned Case Study starkness in favor of Levittown rococo. When asked to decipher its confluence of styles, and, as Mattel's catalogue put it, "all the elegant accessories Barbie has chosen," West Coast architecture critic Aaron Betsky, author of Violated Perfection, was nonplussed. "Well, there's a brick wall that's right out of late Frank Lloyd Wright thirties school," he said, squinting at the Mattel catalogue. "Then there's this slightly Biedermeyer sofa and chair set, next to the television. And over there, next to the modern kitchen, these fake sort of Scandinavian arts and crafts chairs that have suddenly become bar stools."
The hodgepodge of styles in Barbie's house might be interpreted as a reflection of her class anxiety. "Having a period room or a correctly designed room at a certain point becomes very risky socially," Betsky explained. "Because it means that you're sort of snooty." To attract the maximum range of buyers, her furniture could convey neither hoity-toity nor hoi polloi. "If your room is eclectic, it means you've inherited things," he said. "It means that you have a family history and you're not just right off the boat. So it becomes very acceptable to have pieces that show that if you didn't inherit them from your grandmother who lived in West Essex, then at least you had enough money to go on a trip to West Essex and pick up a few pieces, even if they don't quite go with what you got downtown at Macy's."
Barbie also came on the scene at a time when labor-saving devices were liberating middle-class wives from the drudgery of household chores. As affordable mechanical servants replaced the costly human variety, class distinctions blurred. In 1963, New Jersey's Deluxe Reading Corporation issued a "Dream Kitchen" for Barbie-sized dolls that was a monument to the democratizing effects of technology. What its young owner got was no less than the control center of a suburban spaceship—with a deluxe maize-colored range, a chrome-plated turquoise refrigerator, a sand-colored dishwasher, and a magical garbage disposal tucked away in a salmon-colored sink.
One of Barbie's odder flirtations with archaism came on her 1971 Country Camper—a democratizing vehicle that made pastoral retreats, once restricted to country-house owners, available to anyone who could afford a car. In order to invest the camper with luxury, its plastic kitchen cabinets have ovoid Baroque moldings—the sort of thing one would see in their original incarnation at Versailles.
Not surprisingly, when Barbie achieved superstar status, her houses became more ostentatious. Yet even Barbie's three-story town house, with its Tara-like pillars and ersatz wrought-iron birdcage elevator, is an outsider's interpretation of upper-class life. Authentic valuables are to Barbie's possessions what a pungent slab of gorgonzola is to "cheese food"; her furniture and artwork would not look out of place in a Ramada Inn. For all her implicit disposable income, her tastes remain doggedly middle- to lower-middle-class. As pictured in the catalogue, the town house also reflects Dynasty thinking. Both Ken and