While the Margot Robbie-starrer fills up seats in theatres, a new podcast explores her origin story and how she became a cultural touchstone
Barbie inventor Ruth Handler with husband Elliott, holding a Barbie and Ken doll. Pics/Getty Images
Pink is the newest obsession, thanks to Greta Gerwig’s just-released Barbie starring Margot Robbie. While it’s making the right noises about feminism, patriarchy and capitalism, the doll herself has always enjoyed icon status.
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A new mini podcast series, LA Made: The Barbie Tapes, co-hosted by Antonia Cereijido and MG Lord author of Forever Barbie: The Unauthorised Biography of a Real Doll, examines why. “She continues to be the queen of the toy market... Worldwide, according to Mattel, one hundred Barbie dolls are sold every minute,” says Cereijido. Lord, who like her co-host is obsessed with the “intersection of feminism and pop-culture” describes Barbie as a “cultural touchstone”. “There’s also this kind of mythic resonance she has... she is kind of a feminine essence—a goddess archetype, a space-age recasting of a fertility totem.”
Their three-part series draws from their own personal experiences of growing up playing with the doll, and Lord’s research for her book from nearly three decades ago that includes never-before-heard tapes of interviews with Barbie inventor Ruth Handler, her wardrobe designer and the sculptors, and the marketers who made her the cult figure she is today.
The first episode explores the time Barbie first arrived on the toy scene. The story begins in 1938, when Ruth and her husband Elliot Handler married. Shortly after their daughter Barbie, aka Barbara, was born (1941), Elliot was drafted into the US Army to fight World War II. Their son, Ken, came three years later, in 1944. While Elliot continued to shuttle between home and long stints on the battlefield, Ruth spent her time “playing mother” and dreaming up her company Mattel with a family friend. They started by making plastic ukuleles, xylophones, and even toy guns to cater to the baby boomers market, before Ruth noticed her daughter’s own obsession with paper dolls. “She always bought the adult or teenage-type of dolls...in watching her play with her girlfriends, I realised the doll was a prop through which they were interpreting the world as they saw it.”
Barbie, the doll, was born some years later in 1959—her celebrityhood, the hosts share, was almost instantaneous. The podcast goes on discuss how the idea for Ken came into being, before talking about the ups and downs, and criticisms Mattel faced for setting unrealistic beauty standards with their dolls. But Barbie is at the heart of this story—she reminded women they could be anything: A beauty queen to a corporate powerhouse, and even an astronaut, with her heart set on the moon... which leads to today when you can be all of these in one person.
Apple Podcasts; Spotify
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