Do you have some Barbie Dolls

I think most of women use to play and someone also collecting until today. It is believed that there are well over a hundred thousand women that own these wonderful collectible dolls. Nearly all these women not girls and about ten percent of Barbie collectors are male as well. Over the years, Barbie has managed to stay in tune with her owners, in dress, physical appearance and at the same time maintain her unique sweetness that has captured the hearts of generations of young girls.

Barbie: Destiny’s Child – Beyonce Doll
A Barbie girl was portrayed to have the perfect face, figure, clothes and accessories. Barbie girl accessories did not only include items like shoes and bags but extended to items like fur, furniture and even a car and a Malibu House.

Moreover the women that own such collections are statistically usually in their forties and purchase an average of twenty such dolls each year, sometimes spending about a thousand or more dollars in the process.
Barbie has been a hit since it was launched in 1959 and has enslaved children and adult alike with her charm. Perhaps, not a single consumer exists without being aware of who or what a Barbie girl is, even though it has been over 50 years since the first Barbie was produced.

Photo: tycn16
Being one of the most sought after products in the world of doll industry, a Barbie doll has definitely a great potential because of its increasing value. It more than dolls, the Barbie girl image has branched out into other areas like actual fashion for girls. It is like the Barbie girl image was too much to be contained and has spread on to areas like printed materials in the form of books, movies, games and life sized accessories like notebooks and others.
From young girls, teenagers up to older women who were fond of collecting dolls-especially vintage dolls-Barbie has become quite a community. Do you thinking about Barbie, find more Barbie for your collection.

BARBIE

This is a story of gender, culture, strategic management and dolls. The New Yorker has run an article about the epic battle between Mattel, owners of the Barbie doll, and M.G.A., the owners of insurgent Bratz doll line. This is old news to the parents of six year old girls, but for the rest of us, Barbie has been rocked by the upstart Bratz. For the first time in nearly forty years, Barbie’s dominance in the toy market has been challenged. It’s a rich tale, read it yourself, but here are some highlights:

• Barbie was launched in 1959 as an alternative to baby dolls. Before Barbie, most companies focused on baby dolls. Barbie was invented to appeal to girls who wanted to be adult and glamorous. Barbie was an instant hit and crushed all competition over the next three decades. Barbie routinely captured about 80-90% of the doll market.
•  Around 2001, M.G.A., a California toy importer, marketed a new doll line called “Bratz.” The concept was simple, yet brilliant. Drop the blond thing and the professional career woman thing. Make the doll ethnically ambiguous, not white and blond. Make the dolls figure less ”Barbie.” Then make the dolls “bling-bling.” Instead of having a job, the girls should be bratty party girls. Shopping, dancing and more shopping was the goal. It was an instant hit. Barbie’s market share dropped from about 90% to 60% in just a few years. Bratz are a run away hit overseas.
•  Not surprisingly, Barbie sued Bratz. Mattel claims that the M.G.A. employee who invented Bratz was formerly a Mattel employee. Therefore, his contract prohibited him from sharing ideas developed at Mattel with other companies. M.G.A. disagrees.
• The sociology of Barbie dolls: Child researchers know that dolls have many functions. One function is to help the child develop an identity distinct from the parents, so kids are always looking for toys that parents might not like. In the 1960s, Barbie fit the bill perfectly. Tall, physcially well developed and always working in exciting careers, Barbie stymied parents who wanted their kids to stick with baby dolls or more “innocent” toys. As time went on, Barbie’s function changed. Sure, there was always a crowd that idolized Barbie, but many kids treated Barbie as an object of desecration, a trend documented by lots of market research. I bet many of our readers will remember disfiguring and trashing Barbie dolls. As more moms worked outside the home and had high powered careers, Barbie seemed less cutting edge as moms bonded with girls over Barbie and thus more ridiculous. Also, the blond & white ideal embodied by Barbie became less relevant as America became a more ethnically diverse place. Barbie was now the symbol to be mocked.
• The sociology of Bratz dolls: Bratz are the perfect antidote to Barbie malaise. Why? Parents hate Bratz because they party and shop, and not much else. When I went to the local Target the other day, I went to the toy section and found out that the Bratz “Passion 4 Fashion” doll house has its own disco! I also found out that for about $40, you can buy the Bratz runway truck. You see, the Bratz need to set up a run way to show off the clothes they bought at the mall. So you need the truck, which folds out into a stage, so you can have your own runway fashion show. And no, Bling-Bling Barbie is *not* an adequate response (though she does look suspiciously like a Bratz doll…).
• The other remarkable thing about Bratz is they don’t look like Barbie at all. They are short, have trim figures and are of ambigious ethnicity. This is the exact opposite of Barbie, who is tall, busty and definitely blond. What I found odd was that the “ethnic” Barbie looked like the regular Barbie with a bad make up job. The Bratz come in all kinds of convincing colors and because she has curvy eyes and lips, could be of nearly any ethnicity. Add ethnically vague names like “Clara” and “Yasmin” and you have a doll that can be marketed from Iowa to Beijing.
• Technical note: The Bratz earned their share of the market place with an ingenious invention – snap off feet. A problem with Barbie and other dolls was that you lose the shoes all the time because they are so small. With Bratz, you snap off the lower portion of the leg and feet. Because the foot & ankle is larger than the shoe, it’s easier to find and easier for little hands to hold.

Barbie Girls

	I was reminded of this display when we were watching The Stepford Wives during our Critical Theory class. The movie is about the horrors of losing female identity and being turned into mere fem-bots for the convenience and pleasure of the men. The wives that have been turned into plastic dolls have no feelings, expressions or desire, they are merely objects that attend to their husbands every whim. The wives are presumed to be killed by the female robots. The horror within the movie is that there is no happy ending. The final eerie shot is of the automaton shopping within the supermarket, cold, artificial and practised.

That said, the MAC product seems to aestheticize and commodify artificiality. The expression on the models faces are impassive, mimicking the dead-look that Barbie wears. Their eyes are never directed at the camera lens but rather glance down coyly or upwards in reverence. Their lips are positioned in pouts, slightly open in a suggestive manner. Yes, this is pretty much the standard feature of women in advertisements, and more disturbingly in Facebook pictures. But the frightening aspect of this particular MAC advertisement is the actual reproduction and glorification of the artificial look. It urges women to take on the plastic beauty of Barbie. The product advertisement is counter to what is considered the horror within Stepford Wives. The main character, Joanna, fights for the natural or maternal representation of women. Her physical appearance throughout the movie before her death, is unpolished, open and honest. She wears clothes that are loose and her hair is mostly unbound. Her job as a photographer also places her behind the lens of the camera, therefore she has control and power over her subjects. She also chooses to take pictures of her children at play, and she fiercely defends it as her best work. However the natural look of the women's body is slowly destroyed as the women in the movie are recreated as mere images of the commodity culture. It also brings into consideration the mass amount of Barbie dolls that are produced for the consumption of young girls. It is the recreation of the similar image in huge amounts, of women as fake, artificial and unreal. There is nothing unique or different about these millions of dolls that little girls are told to idealize. This shot is of the final scene of the movie, where the transformation is complete for all the robots. The women are dressed in similar outfits with white gloves and hats. They appear dainty, demure and photographed within the grocery store, a pre-dominantly female space. The Barbie look and the automaton women in Stepford wives are symbols of the natural aging of women being freezed. Even observing all make-up or body products that are available for female consumption most of them contain anti-aging or skin tightening chemicals. Women are continuously told to arrest the natural cycle of aging and to preserve their youthfulness and appeal. The growing fear of aging is marketed and sold by capitalism. Women are continuously told that it is important to maintain one's youthful appearance. The commodity culture renders age as something horrific. Plastic however, never fades or grows older, it is a matter that stays on forever. It leaches and is non-degradable and here we can think of Barthes article on "Plastic", and the shifting of its identity and value. Plastic was a matter that was celebrated however, it now cultivates fears because of its persistency. There is a paradox with this fear in both Stepford Wives and MAC models. The persistency and spread of plasticity within Stepford Wives is filmed as a horrifying occurrence. It is a problem or betrayal that is silently taking over the area without anyones knowledge. I digress a little, but the creation of these auto-matron are never really shown, they appear suddenly without any warning. The gaps within the process are a reflection of a problem that cannot be named therefore understood. This can be interpreted as a fear of the technological mediated society that was fast being reproduced. It was the unknown fear that envelopes the two main female characters Joanna and Bobbie, who become more desperate and paranoid that there is a threat to their female identities. What is it about Barbie dolls that fascinates the female consumer? She is supposedly appealing because she is created to fit into what is considered an "ideal" body type. Her features are very striking and attention grabbing. She is created to look perfect and polished. This is a toy that younger female children desire, and at that young age they are being visually subjected to what is considered beautiful or pleasing. This creates an internalized ideal concept of the fake beauty that Barbie represents. The MAC product then pushes at the nostalgic feeling that women have for their Barbies. Commodity sets the standard idea of ideal beauty. Barbie has also inspired a spin-off doll termed Bratz. These dolls are targeted at children between the ages of 8-12, but who honestly follows those age guidelines? These dolls, are dressed in fishnet stockings, skirts that leave little to the imagination and feather boas. These dolls are highly sexualized and created to talk about boys, clothes and fashion. I digress again, but it all draws back to young girls being subjected to a certain type of physical and that she must strive for. To have the MAC product create a make-up brand that enlivens the dead beauty of Barbies contrast greatly what the women in Stepford Wives are fighting for. Does their loss in the end still permeate the current age? Have we actually moved away from the horrors of the Stepford incidents, or are we still victims of this conspiracy? Has capitalism twisted women's desire that they are still made to believe that this is the ideal type of beauty?