‘Barbie’s mother’: German tabloid claims credit for inspiring famous doll

As Hollywood movie Barbie hits cinemas worldwide on Friday, Germany’s Bild tabloid has held up its hand to take credit – or blame – for inspiring the doll.

The inspiration for all-American Barbie is Bild-Lilli, a doll with familiar blond hair and wasp waist that first appeared in 1955.

The doll was in turn inspired by a cartoon, and a chance moment of newsroom creativity on June 23rd, 1952. The first-ever edition of the Bild tabloid was about to hit the press when editors noticed a gap – dreaded white space – on page two.

With the print deadline looming, Bild cartoonist Reinhard Beuthien quickly sketched a picture of a young woman he called Lilli, with pursed lips and her hair pulled into a ponytail.

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The idealised modern West German woman appeared daily and, like her tabloid home, became such a hit with readers that Bild decided to make a Lilli doll, equipped with her own miniature copy of the newspaper.

“She didn’t just look good, she had a job, she was single and earned her own money, she was self-confident and independent,” said Lars Broder-Keil, head of the archive at Bild publisher Axel Springer Verlag.

Originally the doll was not intended to be a child’s toy but a point-of-sale merchandising tool for Bild. But Bild-Lilli was such a hit that production was ramped up and new models were brought out with new outfits from office-wear to swimsuit.

A brochure from the 1950s states that Bild-Lilli was “always discreet” and that her wardrobe made her “the star of every bar”, “naive but clever”. In total 130,000 Lilli dolls, in two different sizes had been sold when US businesswoman Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel, spotted a Lilli doll in the window of a store in Lucerne, Switzerland.

“We were absolutely fascinated and lingered outside the shop for the longest time,” she wrote in her memoir. “The Lilli doll was the embodiment of an idea I’d pitched ... to our toy designers five years earlier.”

That idea was rejected as “too hard-looking and cartoonish”, but Handler stocked up on Lilli dolls before returning to the US for another go. On the Barbie doll’s successful release in 1959, with minimum changes to her hair, lips and eyebrows, the owners of the Lilli patent in Germany got wind of the success and sued.

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“In the end they sold the patent rights to Mattel for $25,000,” said the tabloid. Noting Barbie product turnover last year alone of $1.5 billion, Bild added: “It was perhaps the worst deal in business history.”

Today Lilli dolls are collectors items, with just three in the Axel Springer archive. Keil points to early photos of two original models without clothes side by side.

“There is basically no difference,” said Mr Keil. “Lilli is Barbie’s mother.”