I grew up obsessed with Barbie.
She was my favorite toy, and my earliest avenue to imaginary play and fashion. My mother loves Barbie too, and spent hours with me pairing outfits. When we couldn’t afford a real Barbie house, my mother charmed carpet samples off the salesmen at the flooring store across the street, and laid them on the floor in the corner of my bedroom, each colored square representing a different “room” in Barbie’s house. She hung vintage scarves low on the walls to represent Barbie’s posh wallpaper.
My mother never outgrew Barbie, and neither did I. We both still have impressive collections, mostly cobbled together from thrift stores. The majority of mine are unboxed and piled in a basket in my living room; the shelves in my mother’s house are lined with collectible Barbies still pristine in their packaging and interspersed with thrifted dolls dressed in crocheted outfits she finds on Poshmark. Thirty years later, we still sit together on her couch and dig through piles of Barbie clothes.
The Barbie movie, directed by Greta Gerwig, opens in less than two months (the weekend of my birthday!), and the plastic princess has been heavy in media lately. I had the idea for the below photoshoot when thinking about Barbie’s hard plastic smallness in comparison to my body’s soft muchness. A lot has been made of Barbie’s impact on girls’ body image; her proportions have been proved to be nearly impossible for an actual human body to function. The flowing blonde hair, the miniscule waist, the blue doe eyes, all pose a risk to a young person’s developing self-esteem.
But as a child of Barbie, I never thought of her as someone I needed to emulate. She was a vehicle for fun clothing and imaginative adult scenarios I wanted to play-act. It never crossed my mind that I needed to look like Barbie; I simply wanted to use her bendy little body to live out adult life as I saw it in my young mind. I appreciate the more inclusive versions of Barbie that have hit shelves in recent years, but growing up in the eighties, I understood Barbie could be her version of beautiful, and I could be mine.
Which I also credit to my mother, who is brunette and curvy and proud. My mother teaching me that we were beautiful no matter what anyone else looked like, fictious or not, had far more impact on my self-image than the impossible proportions of a doll. I have more ideas for Barbie photoshoots to come this summer, and although I initially was not sure how this one would pan out, I am beyond pleased with the results. It captures everything I had in my heart when I set out to make it, the juxtaposition of Barbie’s femininity versus a real woman’s, and the beauty of both.
As always, comments and thoughts are welcome. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.