![]() ![]() To create Barbie, Mattel desexualized and Americanized Lilli, giving her a California glow, evening out her dramatically arched eyebrows and toning down her red, puckered lips. At the time, Lilli was coveted not by little girls but by grown men, though exactly what they did with the dolls no one was saying. The character was something of a floozy, with many R-rated adventures. Based on a risqué comic book character, Lilli was mostly sold in tobacco shops. During a visit to Germany, she spotted an unusual doll known as Bild Lilli in a shop window. The end of the baby-doll era came in the late 1950s, after Ruth Handler, along with her husband Elliot, a founder of the young Mattel company, had a eureka moment. Girls would pretend to bottle-feed, dress, and comfort their dolls in imitation of their housewife mothers, who, in turn, tended to their real-life average of five (!) children. For much of commercial toy history, baby dolls were your basic girl toy. I don’t know whether the company or the movie are actually as woke as some are grumbling, but I do know Mattel saw the sales potential of the woke phenomenon when Nikole Hannah-Jones was still in elementary school.Ĭonsider Barbie’s origins. The movie is only the latest in a long series of brilliant chess moves confirming Mattel’s place as the World Champion Grand Master of marketing to progressive, relatively affluent, sophisticated consumers. Judging from the pink tsunami of the past few weeks, Mattel’s efforts are paying off. It sees the movie as a way for everyone-“teens, young adults, moms, glammas ” to “engage in the franchise,” in the words of Richard Dickson, Mattel’s former president and COO (now CEO of clothing retailer Gap). Young children are Mattel’s core customers, but the company has set its sights on a much wider market. Well, you may not be interested in Barbie, but Barbie-or more precisely, Mattel, Barbie’s corporate puppet master-is interested in you. You’re sick of the whole “women are so oppressed yet so wow.” You’ve heard it a million times already the future is female. You roll your eyes at the Barbie luggage, the candles, the ice cream, the Airbnb listing, the NFTs. You don’t care about the stunning $162 million global record-breaking opening weekend. ![]()
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