Meanwhile, American beauty ideals have evolved: the curvaceous bodies of Kim Kardashian West, Beyoncé and Christina Hendricks have become iconic, while millennial feminist leaders like Lena Dunham are deliberately baring their un-Barbie-like figures onscreen, fueling a movement that promotes body acceptance. The estimated revenue loss to Mattel from Elsa and the other Disney Princesses is $500 million. Then Hasbro won the Disney Princess business away from Mattel, just as Elsa from the film Frozen dethroned Barbie as the most popular girl’s toy. A line of toys designed to teach girls to build, Lego Friends, helped boost Lego above Mattel as the biggest toy company in the world in 2014. Barbie sales plummeted 20% from 2012 to 2014 and continued to fall last year. The company is setting up a separate help line just to deal with Project Dawn complaints.īut staying the course was not an option. Fits will be thrown, exasperated moms will call Mattel. And like me, girls will strip curvy Barbie and try to put original Barbie’s clothes on her or swap the skirts of petite and tall. Adding three new body types now is sure to irritate someone: just picking out the terms petite, tall and curvy, and translating them into dozens of languages without causing offense, took months. But the initiative could also backfire-if it’s not too late altogether.
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The company hopes that the new dolls, with their diverse body types, along with the new skin tones and hair textures introduced last year, will more closely reflect their young owners’ world. Lord, a Barbie biographer, once said she was designed “to teach women what-for better or worse-is expected of them in society.” She’s been the global symbol of a certain kind of American beauty for generations, with brand recognition that’s up there with Mickey Mouse. The brand does $1 billion in sales across more than 150 countries annually, and 92% of American girls ages 3 to 12 have owned a Barbie, thanks in part to her affordable $10 price tag. They’ll all be called Barbie, but it’s the curvy one-with meat on her thighs and a protruding tummy and behind-that marks the most startling change to the most infamous body in the world. 28 they will be sold alongside the original busty, thin-waisted form on. Three new bodies, actually: petite, tall and curvy, in Mattel’s exhaustively debated lexicon, and beginning Jan.
Her plump bottom gets stuck in the same spot. “Try going feet first,” the lead designer suggests, and I do. I try to tug it over her head, but the waistline gets stuck at her shoulders, her blond mane peeking out from the neckline. It’s a blue summery frock, cinched tightly at the waist with a black ribbon.
Like every girl who has ever played with the most popular toy in history, I yank her clothes off and try to put on a new dress. Her creation has been kept so secret that the designers code-named the endeavor Project Dawn so that even their spouses wouldn’t be tipped off to her existence. I’m sitting in a bright pink room at Mattel’s headquarters in El Segundo, Calif., playing with a Barbie that only 20 people in the world know exists.
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