In 1959, a chesty
11-and-a-half-inch doll wobbled into the marketplace in a zebra-striped
maillot and steep stilletto mules(Lord,C6). " She was haughty and sexy
having been closely modeled on the German Newspaper Bild's Lilli Doll, a
lascivious plaything for grown men" (Lord,C6). Her target audience,
however, was young girls, especially those of suburbia. Her name was
Barbie, and she soon wormed her way into a generation's inner lives
(Lord, C6).
Barbie is a synthetic
plastic beauty with long blonde hair made of polymers and a painted on
face, as seen in the images above, but in the
eyes of little girls she has always symbolized perfection. She has rolled
out of the Mattel, Inc. factory as fast as the consumers can buy her
since her creation by Ruth Adler, co-founder of Mattel, (Phillips, A:12) in
1959. Despite the
fact that she is man-made, she still has been seen as a real person to
all little girls who have ever owned her. Because of this great
admiration of little girls, Barbie has had a duty to be appealing
at all times to the consumer over the last four decades. This has been a
task that must have been hard for Mattel to keep up with in creating new
Barbies.
Barbie has and will always
be designed to symbolize what little girls want when they grow up. She
has the fancy house with the handsome boyfriend and every material object
that could be imagined (Phillips, A:12). She has been the ideal woman to
little girls for
her entire existence due to all of her accessories as formentioned plus
for the fact that she is beautiful and perfectly proportioned. She has
the long healthy blonde hair that has been a symbol of beauty through
her existence, a long lean body, and perfect make-up and skin due to the
wonders of paint. She was and is still be/barbiehead.gifing designed to
be idolized and
displayed as the most popular doll in the world.