SHE TURNED 50 this year, but the Barbie bandwagon which descended on Dublin’s Grafton Street yesterday, complete with life-size mannequins and a €100,000 Fiat Barbie, shows no sign of slowing down.
Despite her worldwide popularity and iconic status, the doll’s career hasn’t all been rose-tinted. Barbie in her multifarious guises, unlikely body shape and with her insatiable appetite for consumption has divided female opinion, angered parents, intrigued sociologists, but enchanted little girls.
As a so-called ideal image of female beauty, she has often been blamed for eating disorders and other social ills, though recent evidence from the UK suggests that the Barbie ideal is a myth and that many young girls torture and mutilate their dolls.
The Barbie extravaganza in BT2 is part of an aggressive worldwide marketing strategy by Mattel Toys to arrest declining sales of Barbies which fell by 15 per cent in 2007.
The plans included the opening last March of a £20 million (€23 million), six-storey House of Barbie department store in Shanghai.
They also include targeting fashion designers and cult shops – earlier this year US and UK designers were asked to create Barbie-inspired adult-size outfits shown in Paris, London and New York. The life-size shop window mannequins in Dublin are based on some of the best selling Barbies from the 1950s and 1960s, scaled up from the dolls by Kevin Arpino of Rootstein, a UK company which makes shop-window mannequins.
“Barbie depicted the decades,” said Sarah Allen of Mattel UK at the opening yesterday.
“Adults see her differently to children – when you see children playing . . . it is a basic play pattern, dressing her up, doing her hair. And it takes people back to their childhoods.”