Forever Barbie Read Free

were her firstborn child. Others schmoozed with reliable, well-known dealers—Los Angeles-based
     Joe Blitman, author of Vive La Francie, an homage to Francie, Barbie's small-breasted cousin who was born in 1966 and lasted until 1975; and Sarah Sink Eames, from
     Boones Mill, Virginia, author of Barbie Fashion, a photographic record of the doll's wardrobe. I learned the value of established dealers when I bought "Queen of the Prom,"
     the 1961 Barbie board game, from a shifty-eyed woman who was not a convention regular. "The set's kind of beat-up," she told
     me, "but all the pieces are authentic." Right, lady. Barbie's allowance, I discovered when I played the game, was five dollars.
     The smallest denomination in the set she sold me was $100. (The bills were from another game.)
    Selling was not the only action at the convention. There was a fashion show in which collectors arranged their not-especially-Barbie-esque
     bodies into life-size versions of their favorite Barbie outfits. There was a competition of dioramas illustrating the theme
     "Wedding Dreams"; one, which did not strike me as lighthearted, featured a male doll (not Ken) recoiling in fear and horror
     from Barbie and, implicitly, Woman, on his wedding night. (His face had been whitened and his eyes widened into circles.)
     Employees of Mattel were treated like rock stars. Early on the second night of the convention, veteran costume designer Carol
     Spencer, who has been dressing Barbie since 1963, settled down in the hotel lobby to autograph boxes of "Benefit Ball Barbie,"
     one of her creations in Mattel's Classique Collection, a series promoting its in-house designers. At eleven, she was still
     signing.
    Intense feelings about Barbie do not run exclusively toward love. For every mother who embraces Barbie as a traditional toy
     and eagerly introduces her daughter to the doll, there is another mother who tries to banish Barbie from the house. For every
     fluffy blond cheerleader who leaps breast-forward into an exaggerated gender role, there is a recovering bulimic who refuses
     to wear dresses and blames Barbie for her ordeal. For every collector to whom the amassing of Barbie objects is a language
     more exquisite than words, there is a fiction writer or poet or visual artist for whom Barbie is muse and metaphor—and whose
     message concerns class inequities or the dark evanescence of childhood sexuality.
    Barbie may be the most potent icon of American popular culture in the late twentieth century. She was a subject of the late
     pop artist Andy Warhol, and when I read Arthur C. Danto's review of Warhol's 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art,
     I thought of her. Danto wrote that pop art's goal was elevating the commonplace; but what, he wondered, would happen when
     the commonplace ceased to be commonplace? How would future generations interpret Warhol's paintings—generations for which
     Brillo boxes, Campbell soup labels, and famous faces from the 1960s and '70s would not be instantly identifiable?
    Danto's meditations got me thinking about the impermanence of living icons. What, for instance, is Valentino to us today?
     A shadow jerking across a black-and-white screen, campy at best, no more an image of smoldering sex appeal than, say, Lassie.
     What is Dietrich? To the millions who read her daughter's vindictive, best-selling biography, she is an amphetamine-ridden
     drunk with disgusting gynecological problems, so leery of hospitals that she let a wound in her thigh fester until her leg
     was threatened with amputation. What is Marilyn? A caricature, a corpse, the subject of tedious documentaries linking her
     to RFK and JFK. And what is Elvis? To anyone over forty, he's probably still the sexy crooner from Tupelo; but younger people
     recall him as a bloated junkie encrusted with more rhinestones than Liberace.
    Barbie has an advantage over all of them. She can never bloat. She has no children to betray her. Nor can she rot, wrinkle,