Forever Barbie Quotes

“The company has no archive. This may help conceal its embarrassments, but it has also buried its achievements—such as subsidizing Shindana Toys in response to the 1965 Watts riots. The African-American-run, South Central Los Angeles—based company produced ethnically correct playthings long before they were fashionable.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“Gilles Brougere, a French sociologist, has conducted an exhaustive study of French women and children to determine how different age groups perceive the doll.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“When Ella King Torrey, a friend of mine and consultant on this book, began researching Barbie at Yale University in 1979, her work was considered cutting-edge and controversial.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“Fans of conspiracy theories will be disappointed to learn that Barbie's proportions were not the result of some misogynistic plot. They were dictated by the mechanics of clothing construction. The doll is one-sixth the size of a person, but the fabrics she wears are scaled for people. Barbie's middle, her first designer explained, had to be disproportionately narrow to look proportional in clothes. The inner seam on the waistband of a skirt involves four layers of cloth—and four thicknesses of human-scale fabric on a one-sixth-human-scale doll would cause the doll's waist to appear dramatically larger than her hips.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“Barbie, too, has changed her look more than once through the years, though her body has remained essentially unaltered. From an art history standpoint—and Barbie, significantly, has been copyrighted as a work of art—her most radical change came in 1971, and was a direct reflection of the sexual revolution. Until then, Barbie's eyes had been cast down and to one side—the averted, submissive gaze that characterized female nudes, particularly those of a pornographic nature, from the Renaissance until the nineteenth century. What had been so shocking about Manet's Olympia (1865) was that the model was both naked and unabashedly staring at the viewer. By 1971, however, when America had begun to accept the idea that a woman could be both sexual and unashamed, Barbie, in her "Malibu" incarnation, was allowed to have that body and look straight ahead.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“To study Barbie, one sometimes has to hold seemingly contradictory ideas in one's head at the same time—which, as F. Scott Fitzgerald has said, is "the test of a first-rate intelligence.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“TO FIRST-GENERATION BARBIE OWNERS, OF WHICH I WAS one, Barbie was a revelation. She didn't teach us to nurture, like our clinging, dependent Betsy Wetsys and Chatty Cathys. She taught us independence. Barbie was her own woman. She could invent herself with a costume change: sing a solo in the spotlight one minute, pilot a starship the next. She was Grace Slick and Sally Ride, Marie Osmond and Marie Curie. She was all that we could be and—if you calculate what at human scale would translate to a thirty-nine-inch bust—more than we could be. And certainly more than we were . . . at six and seven and eight when she appeared and sank her jungle-red”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“Consequently, what could be more American than being an unimpeachable citizen with a sordid, embarrassing forebear in Europe?”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“After Ruth and her husband Elliot, with whom she founded Mattel, left the company in 1975, women have continued to be the key decision makers on the Barbie line; the company's current COO, a fortyish ex-cosmetics marketer given to wearing Chanel suits, has been so involved with the doll that the Los Angeles Times dubbed her "Barbie's Doting Sister.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“By the time children play with Barbie, they have too many other factors in their environment to be able to link a specific behavior trait with a particular toy. But because Barbie has both shaped and responded to the marketplace, it's possible to study her as a reflection of American popular cultural values and notions about femininity. Her houses and friends and clothes provide a window onto the often contradictory demands that the culture has placed upon women.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“Barbie has an advantage over all of them. She can never bloat. She has no children to betray her. Nor can she rot, wrinkle, overdose, or go out of style. Mattel has hundreds of people—designers, marketers, market researchers—whose full-time job it is continually to reinvent her. In 1993, fresh versions of the doll did a billion dollars' worth of business. Based on its unit sales, Mattel calculates that every second, somewhere in the world, two Barbies are sold.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

“When it comes to parental ill will toward Barbie, I believe femininity is the toxin; Barbie is the scapegoat.”
― M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll