It looks like the Barbie doll line has gotten another makeover - one that has been 50 years in the making.
After five decades of being an avatar for female beauty standards for little girls worldwide (and an object of criticism due to these same untenable and unobtainable benchmarks), the creative forces behind Barbie have come out with the new Fashionistas Line that features iterations of the doll in different body sizes. The Barbie line garners roughly $1 billion worth of sales annually for toy company Mattel.
The Fashionistas line features Curvy, Petite, and Tall dolls, all named after their varying body types, all of which are meant to reflect the realistic body types of people in the everyday world of the Barbie doll owner. According to an exclusive with Time, roughly 92 percent of American girls from the ages 3 to 12 have owned a Barbie in their lifetime.
The Fashionistas line includes dolls with "4 body types, 7 skin tones, 18 eye colors, 18 hairstyles," as per Mattel, with some sporting alternative hallmarks; Doll 27, for instance, comes with a punkish striped top and blue hair.
"This is radical because we're saying there isn't this narrow standard of beauty of what a beautiful body looks like," said Mattel's senior director of product design Robert Best in a video released by Mattel on Jan. 28.
"It's going to be so much fun for girls to pick out dolls they really relate to, that they connect with," added Shirley Fujisaki, a Barbie hair designer.
The effect of the video - and the line - is heartwarming and effective. Case in point? As a girl says in the Mattel video: "I like [the dolls] because this one looks like me, and this one looks like my mom."
Learn about the evolution of the Barbie doll (and the story behind Mattel's decision to come out with the Fashionistas line) in the video clip below.
Source: Mattel
