It’s Not a Barbie World

Barbie, the most famous doll in the world, symbol of American girlhood, and now the star of a feature film, carries with her, along with many accessories, a complicated origin story. The official Mattel history holds that Barbie was born in 1959, when creator and Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler observed her daughter playing for hours with paper figures and spotted a chance to “champion and inspire girls” by providing them with a three-dimensional doll. 

The less salubrious version traces the inspiration for Barbie to a European holiday where Handler encountered the wildly popular Bild Lilli, a leggy blonde doll sold in tobacconist shops to adults as a novelty item, based on the character Lilli in a comic strip of the same name published in the German tabloid Bild. Lilli was a sassy escort, the star of every bar who was often stopped by the police for wearing too little. Handler initially couldn’t get Mattel to produce a grown-up doll with breasts, but her project took off after bringing home Bild Lilli. Manufacturing of her doll, which she called Barbie, began in Japan, a country experiencing its own postwar agonies about sex, innocence, and girls’ bodies. Mattel acquired the rights to Bild Lilli in 1964.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Barbie conquered the United States, settling in Malibu with a poolside playhouse and acquiring a pliant boyfriend named Ken, a lady-in-waiting younger sister called Skipper, and assorted friends and relatives. Her early disinterest in any vocation and pursuit of independence through purchases of living room decor miniaturized the mores of postwar U.S. suburban life, of the stultifying Revolutionary Road variety. 

By the time she turned 40, in 1999, Barbie was a reliably divisive icon aggravating Western feminists. That year, Australian writer Germaine Greer was pictured biting the head off a Barbie for her book The Whole Woman, in which she rails against the doll’s “non-functional body.” Others insisted the obsession with Barbie was trivial, that Barbie was probably a feminist anyway (witness her long-running indifference to Ken), and that her appeal was something “the First World and Third World agree on,” a column in Britain’s Independent newspaper argued.

Like any good manufacturer, Mattel hoped as much. It embarked on launching Barbie among the emergent middle classes of the non-Western world in the late 1990s and 2000s. There is an extensive literature of Barbie’s international failure that brings business schools and gender specialists into conversation. As a doll for girls modeled after a Western European erotic fantasy, Barbie, in all her travels, has encountered gender sensibilities that she offended or simply couldn’t excite, eliciting unpredictable reactions that had more to do with societies’ own internal cultural and political fractures. 

In the early 2000s, Barbie was banned in a number of countries where she was resolutely popular. The Russian authorities, dismayed at the lingering hold Barbie had on the imaginations of Russian girls since the Cold War, rejected her in 2002, concluding that she stimulated “early sexual interest” among young children. The Croatian feminist Slavenka Drakulic writes in her memoir How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed that for women and girls living under Soviet rule, Barbie evoked a life of freedom, comfort, and glamour, a contrast to the “wearying immobility” of the Soviet grind, “something to be endured, not enjoyed.” 

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In Iran, too, Barbie captivated a secularizing middle class that expressed its frustration with the Islamic regime’s political suffocation by identifying with Western consumer culture. I was based in Tehran in 2002 when the authorities cracked down on stores selling Barbie and rolled out Sara and Dara, lumpy twins dressed in ill-fitting Iranian folk outfits who were a hit with next to no one. 

The next year, the Saudi regime also moved against Barbie, banning what it called “Jewish Barbie dolls” whose “shameful postures” carried a dangerous “symbol of decadence to the perverted West.” That wave of religious conservatism in the Middle East, which culminated in the Islamist movements that dominated the aftermath of the Arab Spring, propelled the success of Barbie’s rival in the region: Fulla, who wears hijab and abaya, pays careful attention to her eye makeup, and accessorizes with both handbags and a prayer mat. Fulla has consistently outsold Barbie across the Arab world since she turned up in 2003, but she has made no inroads in Iran, where the romance of political Islam is dead and Barbie has retained enough appeal to prompt fresh crackdowns. 

In parts of the world where Barbie held no oppositional cache, she often simply flopped. In 2009, Mattel opened a pink six-floor flagship Barbie store in Shanghai that failed to attract consumers. It was the biggest retail misread in China in recent years. Mattel’s Shanghai experiment attempted to market Barbie to Chinese consumers as an adult lifestyle brand. The store offered a spa, Barbie-style makeovers, and a racy clothing line designed by Sex and the City costume designer Patricia Field. Chinese women did not find this alluring. Their tastes veered between Snoopy and Gucci, with no place in between for Barbie’s suburban bridge-and-tunnel aesthetic. The shop shut after two years. 

India, that other enormous untapped market Mattel eyed hungrily, was also unentranced by Barbie. In the Indian market, she wore a sari as “Barbie in India,” but her standard physical form came across as hypersexualized and borderline obscene; she remained a tourist, never becoming, as the academic Priti Nemani put it, an “Indian doll.” With sales lackluster, Mattel tried again with a collection that set Barbie across India’s various states, producing “Mystical Manipuri” and “Roopvati Rajasthani” Barbie, but the doll retained its ski-jump European nose and Victoria’s Secret Angels physique and, despite all its bangles and chandelier earrings, did no better at all, prompting Mattel to focus on Lego. 

Having toured the world with little success, Barbie is undergoing an existential transformation in the United States. Recently, a friend’s 8-year-old daughter asked me to play Barbie, and I happily agreed. Leaning down to inspect her Barbie Dreamhouse, I met prosthetic leg Barbie, propped up against the hot tub, looking very serene despite her artificial limb. What was the story? Had she tripped over a land mine? Was Barbie now a war reporter? I asked. The 8-year-old looked at me confused. There was no story. Barbie was just different now.

This article appears in the Summer 2023 issue of Foreign Policy. Subscribe now to support our journalism.