【时代周刊 20160208】芭比娃娃的新造型

满仓

【中文标题】芭比娃娃的新造型
【原文标题】Barbie’s Got a New Body
【登载媒体】时代周刊
【原文作者】Eliana Dockterman
【原文链接】http://time.com/barbie-new-body-cover-story/



美泰发布了世界上最畅销的娃娃玩具的三个新的体形。在这个具有57年历史的芭比娃娃的最大变革中，是否体现了美国人的审美变化呢？



一，芭比的衣服穿不上啦。

我坐在加利福尼亚州埃尔塞贡多市美泰公司总部的一间亮粉色办公室里，把玩着一个目前世界上只有20个人知道其存在的芭比娃娃。这个娃娃的开发过程被高度保密，设计者称其为“黎明项目”，这样他们的家人也不会猜测出她的存在。

像所有曾经玩过这个历史上最受欢迎的玩具的女孩一样，我脱下她的衣服，试图换上另外一套服装。那是一套蓝色的夏装裙子，腰部有一条收紧的黑色丝带。我试着把裙子从头上套下来，但是裙腰卡在肩膀上，开领处只露出一头金发。“试着从脚下套上来。”首席设计师建议，于是我照他说的尝试。还是不行，裙腰卡在她丰满的臀部上，对，丰满的臀部。芭比现在有了一个新的体形，实际上是三个新的体形，用美泰公司搜肠刮肚所思考出来的词汇描述，就是娇小型（petite）、高挑型（tall）和丰腴型（curvy）。从1月28日开始，她们会在Barbie.com上与传统的大胸细腰芭比娃娃一同出售。她们都叫做芭比，但是丰腴型的芭比——大腿、腹部和臀部积累着赘肉——标志着历史上最惊人的改变已经发生在世界上最令人厌烦的玩偶体形上。

这是美泰公司一项巨大的冒险。芭比不仅仅是一个娃娃，这个品牌每年在全球150个国家产生10亿美元的销售额，美国所有3到12岁的女孩中，92％都拥有至少一个芭比娃娃，当然这也部分归功于她10美元的低廉售价。在几代人中，她是美国美女在全球的标志形象，其品牌认知度可以和米老鼠比肩。一位芭比娃娃的传记作家M•G•罗德曾经说，她就是用来“教育美国女人社会对她们的期望——无论是好是坏。”

公司希望多种体形的新娃娃，加上去年推出的新肤色和新发型，可以更好地反应出她们年轻的主人们的真实世界。但是这样的初衷也遭遇到抵制。我们可以确定，新增加的三个体形激怒了一些人。仅仅是把三个描述体形的词语petite、tall、curvy翻译成几十种语言而又不造成冒犯，就花费了几个月的时间。还有，像我的遭遇一样，女孩子们会脱下丰腴型芭比娃娃的衣服，给她穿上原始版本的服装，或者给娇小型和高挑型的娃娃互换服装。不是所有的尼龙搭扣都扣得上。原来的衣服会被浪费，愤怒的妈妈们会给美泰打电话抱怨。公司已经开通了一条专门的服务热线来处理“黎明项目”的投诉。

但是固步自封必然死路一条。芭比2014年的销售额与2012年相比下降了20％，去年还在持续下降。旨在教女孩子们学习如何建造的乐高女孩系列，让乐高在2014年超过美泰，成为世界最大的玩具公司。之后，孩之宝击败美泰，获得了迪士尼公主系列的经营权，《冰雪奇缘》中的艾尔莎已经把芭比推下了最受女孩欢迎玩具的宝座。失去艾尔莎和其它迪士尼公主系列产品的经营权，给美泰带来了5亿美元的业绩损失。

与此同时，美国丽人的理念也在不断进化。金•卡黛珊、碧昂丝和克莉斯蒂娜•亨德里克斯等人丰腴的体形已经成为了美国的标志，包括莉娜•杜汉姆在内的新世纪女权运动领导者有意在电视银幕上展示自己非芭比类型的体形，开始改变人们的美感。在这样的环境下，新一代的妈妈们喜欢给她们的女儿购买更有感染力的玩具。艾尔莎的金发和纤弱或许和芭比的形象一致，但她蕴含着强有力的背景故事和女汉子习气。“00后母亲仅仅是我们消费群体中的一小部分，”芭比品牌总裁伊夫林•马佐克说，“但是我们相信她们代表了未来。”



二，马佐克桌子后面的墙板上写着很多字，包括“脱离现实”、“唯物主义”、“非多样化”。

她在2014年履职不久之后就写上了这些字，美泰当时经历了一些动荡，公司总裁和首席执行官理查德•迪克森任命了一些具有创新背景的人担任各个品牌的负责人，希望他们能有一些新想法来拯救美泰每况愈下的业绩。马佐克所做的第一件事就是调查那些讨厌芭比娃娃的人。

马佐克说：“每天上班时我都要提醒自己，这个品牌在现实中遇到了什么问题。”她有三个女人，她把她们当作自己的“小消费者群体”。其实她并不需要太多的自我提醒，因为她经常会收到有关芭比新体形的诅咒邮件，甚至死亡威胁。

芭比自面世以来就饱受争议。她的创始人露丝•汉德勒根据一个叫做莉莉的德国娃娃塑造了芭比的体形，那是一种在单身汉聚会中用来开玩笑的色情礼物。她的身体比例因此而成型。当汉德勒在1959年纽约玩具博览会上展出芭比娃娃时（以她的女儿芭芭拉命名），那些男性同行把她狠狠嘲笑了一通。他们说，绝对没有人会玩一个有这么大胸部的娃娃。

尽管如此，芭比的销量还是一飞冲天，因为在1963年，女人开始自我反对那种受男人奚落的体形。那一年，与芭比娃娃搭配销售的还有一本书，内容很简单，“戒吃”。当芭比娃娃中出现了预制的发声装置，说：“数学课太难了”之后，一个叫做“芭比解放组织”的团体认为，娃娃教导女孩子美貌比智慧更重要。他们把芭比的发声装置换成特种部队玩偶的发声装置，让金发碧眼的娃娃高喊：“我要复仇！”同时让混身肌肉的武士细声细气地说：“我们来准备梦幻婚礼吧。”

美泰认为，这种批评的声音是错误的——芭比在1963年是商业女性，在1965年是宇航员，在1973年是外科医生，当时只有9％的医生是女性。“我的品牌代表了女性的权利，”迪克森说，“这是有关选择的问题，芭比在不同的时期有不同的职业，是因为当时的女性主要都是家庭妇女。讽刺的是，批评我们的人恰恰应该拥护我们。”

美泰还一直主张，芭比娃娃并没有对女孩的体形产生影响，并提到那些弱不禁风的模特，甚至一些母亲都导致太多的年轻女孩最自己的体形不满。但是，很多研究都发现，芭比的确对女孩理想中的体形产生了影响。最有说服力的是2006年发表在《发展心理学》杂志上的一篇文章，发现在幼年时接触过芭比娃娃的女孩要比接触其它玩偶的女孩更愿意拥有消瘦的体形。



但是，当妈妈们开始有了更多选择的时候，美泰不得不重新评估这些批评的声音。在二十一世纪的前十年，芭比在多年垄断了玩偶市场90％的份额之后，第一次遭遇到严重的竞争。性格怪僻、暴眼球的贝兹娃娃有她们自己的智能手机和润唇膏，她们“蚕食了芭比在大龄女童消费群体中所占有的份额。迪士尼公主系列则抢走了小龄女童中的一大块份额，”迪克森说，“芭比遭遇了身份危机。”

起初，这对美泰公司的整体影响不大。迪克森在2000年入职公司，任务是把芭比的品牌从玩偶扩展到服装、电视节目和游戏领域。当时芭比有了自己的互动网站，在Netflix频道还有自己的电视剧。在玩偶销量下滑的情况下，芭比品牌整体依然处于上升的趋势，美泰公司依然信心十足。公司还通过专利许可为迪士尼公主制作玩偶，为了与贝兹娃娃竞争，他们推出了自己的前卫玩偶系列——精灵高中。



但是在2012年，芭比的全球销售额下降了3％，2013年下降了6％，2014年又下降了16％。《冰雪奇缘》中艾尔莎的阴影让芭比前方的路更加坎坷。即使在电影上映两年之后，《冰雪奇缘》的光环依然没有褪去。在洛杉矶的一家塔吉特商场，我在玩具柜台找到了芭比，她在自己的梦幻房屋中居高临下地凝视着我。另一个货架上是装在盒子里的艾尔莎，她在邀请我去按音乐按钮。我走过去按了一下，她开始播放“Let It Go”。一大群孩子从四面八方跑来，边叫边跳，其中有一个孩子在尝试说服她的妈妈再买一个艾尔莎，尽管家里已经有好几个了。我匆忙逃走了，因为那个妈妈已经开始在寻找究竟是哪个傻瓜在有这么多孩子的商场里播放“Let It Go”了。

这就是芭比的问题所在。无论美泰如何努力把她塑造成一个女权主义者的形象，芭比著名的体形总是掩盖了她的服装所彰显的信息。从性质上来说，她就是一个身体，而不是一个角色，不是一张社会群体可以用来展示其愿望的空白画布。杰西•维那尔是一位品牌专家和咨询师，曾经与德芙、迪士尼和美泰合作，为女孩子传递有关权利的信息。她说：“芭比背负了太多的包袱，她已经失去了权利女性的形象。”

三，有鉴于此，首席设计师金•卡尔蒙内给她的团队提出了一个挑战：

如果由你来设计今天的芭比娃娃，你怎样才能让她具有时代感？除了继续改变芭比的面容，减少化妆效果让她看起来更年轻；给她安装可转动的踝关节，让她可以穿上平底鞋和高跟鞋；增加更多的肤色，接下来当然就是改变体形。丰腴型芭比的臀部、大腿和腿肚子明显比以前版本更大，在腰部以上，她已经不像是兔子杰西卡，而更像一个鸭梨。美泰拒绝透露新款体形的身体比例，也不愿谈论决策过程。

在聆听团队讨论的过程中，很明确的一件事是他们每一步都走得很小心。卡尔蒙内说：“这是一个涉及到个人的问题，因为几乎每个女人都有芭比娃娃，每个女人都与芭比有密切的关系，她们都有自己的态度。”在一次会议上，设计师、市场专员和研究人员在集中讨论鞋的问题。现在，芭比的鞋有两个尺码，一个供丰腴型和高挑型芭比使用，另一个供原版和娇小型芭比使用。芭比设计师、前跑道项目参与者罗伯特•贝斯特说：“我们不能把两种尺码的鞋打上1和2的标签，因为人们会理解为一个比另一个更好。而且，我们还需要在所有的产品上都打上芭比的品牌，但是鞋太小了。”他们最终决定，在一个尺码的鞋上标注“B”，在另一个尺码的鞋上贴上芭比的脸。当妈妈们在沙发靠垫的夹缝处找到一个迷你高跟鞋时，她们要想办法识别出这是哪个体形的娃娃穿的。

实际上，新增加的体形是逻辑学上的噩梦。美泰最初只会在Barbie.com上出售新玩偶，同时与零售商沟通如何给新玩偶、新服装安排更多的货架位置。不同的发质、发型、发色、体形和肤色似乎可以形成无限种组合。接下来还有包装的问题，参与美泰调查的妈妈们表达出一种顾虑，她们不知道该把新体形玩偶送给自己的女儿，还是送给女儿的朋友更好。或许一个敏感的妈妈会把丰腴型芭比礼物理解成对女儿体形的映射？美泰决定把新体形玩偶和原版芭比搭配出售，以回避这个问题。那么该用那种体形的玩偶和原版芭比搭配出售，才能最大程度地实现多样化和利润最大化呢？

“是的，有人会说我们的转型已经很晚了，”马佐克说，“但是大公司的变化就是需要花费更多的时间。”

四，“嗨，我是个胖子，胖子、胖子、胖子。”

在美泰公司总部的测试房间里，一个6岁小女孩边把玩丰腴型芭比边给她配音。她的小伙伴们爆发出一阵笑声。

一个大人走进房间，问她是否发现了这个玩偶的体形有什么不同。她说：“这个娃娃是个小圆脸。”参与其它测试环节的女孩们也同样小心翼翼地避免唐突的措辞，一个8岁的孩子说：“她是……你知道……”她用手比划了一个丰腴的躯体形状。一个害羞的7岁女孩不愿直截了当地说出“fat”这个词，而是改说拼写“f、a、t”。

“我不想伤害她的感情。”她有点失望地说。



芭比对于和她做游戏的女孩子，以及严肃评估她的成年人来说，就是一项罗莎赫氏测试。小学里都安排有专门的反欺辱课程，其中教导女孩子在成年人面前不要使用“胖”这样的字眼，但芭比的研究团队在三年前还不承认这个现实。尽管如此，学会使用委婉表达方式的女孩子们不像妈妈们那样真正接纳了新的芭比体形。

塔尼亚•米萨德负责美泰公司女孩兴趣倾向调查团队，她说：“我们见识过各种各样的反应。大人走出房间，脱下芭比的服装，露出窃笑的表情。对我来说，这样的时刻让我意识到自己的工作有多么重要。以后，我希望女孩子们不要露出这样的表情，而是真正把她当作一个美丽的女人。”

这种迹象说明，6、7岁的孩子已经对玩偶特定的外形有了比较固定的看法，这让美泰面临着更艰巨的挑战。在谈到品牌多样化任务的急迫性时，马佐克提到了她与女儿之间的互动（两个喜欢芭比，另一个不喜欢）。“我会想尽办法让她们做自己并不喜欢的事情，比如完成作业、多吃青菜，”她说，“同样，让她们对那些与自己审美有冲突的玩偶具备包容的心理，也是我的责任。”

在美泰同意让我观察的4个调查小组中，很多母亲都认可美泰的变化方向，她们毕竟是最终购买行为的决定者。尽管年轻的妈妈或许会更多地在社交媒体中评论芭比的新体形，但是美泰的大范围调查结果显示，全国各年龄层和处于各种社会经济地位的妈妈都很在乎肤色和体形的多样化。（我在调查小组中看到的大多数妈妈都是来自中产阶级的白人、黑人和西班牙裔人。）


加利福尼亚州埃尔塞贡多市美泰公司总部正在组装一个芭比娃娃。

“她真是胖得可爱，”一个妈妈说，她有一个19岁的儿子和两个女儿，分别是3岁和5岁，“我很难找到一些合身又体面的衣服，好像你只要稍微丰满一点，就必须要穿长袍。但是她看起来不是这样。”一个妈妈发现了一处纹身，说她宁愿买小马驹的玩具也不愿意买玩偶，就是为了避免体形的问题，其它妈妈们点头表示赞同。大多数人都说，新的芭比体形让她们更愿意掏钱购买。

还有人说美泰做得还不够。一个穿着餐厅服务员制服的妈妈说：“我希望她能更加丰满一点，人的体形可以既丰满又漂亮。我的女儿就比较丰满，我想送给她一个这样的娃娃。我猜这仅仅是一个开始。”

尽管女孩们都觉得丰腴型芭比比较胖，但调查小组中的孩子们挑选自己喜欢的娃娃的标准基本上都是发型，而不是体形。一个丰腴型、蓝头发的娃娃被很多女孩戏称为凯蒂•佩里，她最受欢迎。但是当被问到哪个才是芭比时，女孩们都指向一个金发的娃娃。

所有这些完全不同的娃娃——它们之间没有相似之处——如果都被称作芭比，肯定会让妈妈们疑惑不解。“我把女儿带到一个灯光闪烁的圣诞树下，那里有一个圣诞老人和一个芭比，”调查小组中的一个妈妈说，“如果出现的是一个黑人，或者一个红头发女人，或者一个身体健硕的女人，我的女儿肯定会问：‘芭比在哪儿？’”如果美泰拿走了一切让芭比成为一个标志的特点，她还是一个标志吗？很多公司都试图在几十年的努力中营造出像芭比那样的认知度。当全世界的人闭上眼睛，浮想芭比的形象，他们想到的都是典型的身体形态。如果这种体形发生变化，芭比会失去目前的地位。不管怎样，必然会有一些人不喜欢这个新版本的芭比。真为他们感到遗憾。

“最终，讨厌我们的人会继续讨厌下去，”迪克森说，“我们要确保芭比的热爱这会更爱我们。同时，或许可以让那些不喜欢我们的人保持中立。这就足够了。”




Barbie’s Got a New Body

Mattel releases three new body shapes for the world’s best-selling doll. Inside the biggest change in barbie’s 57-year history–and what it says about American beauty ideals

Part 1

Barbie’s dress won’t fit.

I’m sitting in a bright pink room at Mattel’s headquarters in El Segundo, Calif., playing with a Barbie that only 20 people in the world know exists. Her creation has been kept so secret that the designers code-named the endeavor Project Dawn so that even their spouses wouldn’t be tipped off to her existence.

Like every girl who has ever played with the most popular toy in history, I yank her clothes off and try to put on a new dress. It’s a blue summery frock, cinched tightly at the waist with a black ribbon. I try to tug it over her head, but the waistline gets stuck at her shoulders, her blond mane peeking out from the neckline. “Try going feet first,” the lead designer suggests, and I do. No good. Her plump bottom gets stuck in the same spot. Yes, plump. Barbie’s got a new body. Three new bodies, actually: petite, tall and curvy, in Mattel’s exhaustively debated lexicon, and beginning Jan. 28 they will be sold alongside the original busty, thin-waisted form on Barbie.com. They’ll all be called Barbie, but it’s the curvy one—with meat on her thighs and a protruding tummy and behind—that marks the most startling change to the most infamous body in the world.

It’s a massive risk for Mattel. Barbie is more than just a doll. The brand does $1 billion in sales across more than 150 countries annually, and 92% of American girls ages 3 to 12 have owned a Barbie, thanks in part to her affordable $10 price tag. She’s been the global symbol of a certain kind of American beauty for generations, with brand recognition that’s up there with Mickey Mouse. M.G. Lord, a Barbie biographer, once said she was designed “to teach women what—for better or worse—is expected of them in society.”

The company hopes that the new dolls, with their diverse body types, along with the new skin tones and hair textures introduced last year, will more closely reflect their young owners’ world. But the initiative could also backfire—if it’s not too late altogether. Adding three new body types now is sure to irritate someone: just picking out the terms petite, tall and curvy, and translating them into dozens of languages without causing offense, took months. And like me, girls will strip curvy Barbie and try to put original Barbie’s clothes on her or swap the skirts of petite and tall. Not everything will Velcro shut. Fits will be thrown, exasperated moms will call Mattel. The company is setting up a separate help line just to deal with Project Dawn complaints.

But staying the course was not an option. Barbie sales plummeted 20% from 2012 to 2014 and continued to fall last year. A line of toys designed to teach girls to build, Lego Friends, helped boost Lego above Mattel as the biggest toy company in the world in 2014. Then Hasbro won the Disney Princess business away from Mattel, just as Elsa from the film Frozen dethroned Barbie as the most popular girl’s toy. The estimated revenue loss to Mattel from Elsa and the other Disney Princesses is $500 million.

Meanwhile, American beauty ideals have evolved: the curvaceous bodies of Kim Kardashian West, Beyoncé and Christina Hendricks have become iconic, while millennial feminist leaders like Lena Dunham are deliberately baring their un-Barbie-like figures onscreen, fueling a movement that promotes body acceptance. In this environment, a new generation of mothers favor what they perceive as more empowering toys for their daughters. Elsa might be just as blond and waif-thin as Barbie, but she comes with a backstory of strength and sisterhood. “The millennial mom is a small part of our consumer base,” concedes Evelyn Mazzocco, head of the Barbie brand, “but we recognize she’s the future.”

Part 2

The board behind Mazzocco’s desk is filled with words like out of touch, materialistic, not diverse.

She tacked them up shortly after she took over Barbie in 2014, part of a massive shake-up at Mattel during which president and COO Richard Dickson put people with creative backgrounds at the head of several brands, hoping they would come up with more-innovative solutions to Mattel’s sinking sales. The first thing Mazzocco did in that role was survey Barbie’s haters.

“I wanted to remind myself every time I came to work about the reality of what is going on with the brand,” says Mazzocco, who has three daughters whom she uses as her “own little focus group.” Not that she needed the reminder: she routinely receives hate mail and even death threats over Barbie’s body.

Barbie has courted controversy since her birth. Her creator, Ruth Handler, based Barbie’s body on a German doll called Lilli, a prostitute gag gift handed out at bachelor parties. Her proportions were designed accordingly. When Handler introduced Barbie (named after her daughter Barbara) in 1959 at the New York Toy Fair, her male competitors laughed her out of the room: nobody, they insisted, would want to play with a doll with breasts.

Still, Barbie’s sales took off, but by 1963 women were protesting the same body men had ridiculed. That year, a teen Barbie was sold with a diet book that recommended simply, “Don’t eat.” When a Barbie with pre-programmed phrases uttered, “Math class is tough,” a group called the Barbie Liberation Organization said the doll taught girls that it was more important to be pretty than smart. They switched out Barbie’s voice box with that of GI Joe so that the blonde cried, “Vengeance is mine,” while the macho warrior enthused, “Let’s plan our dream wedding.”

Mattel argues that the criticism was misplaced—that Barbie was a businesswoman in 1963, an astronaut in 1965 and a surgeon in 1973 when 9% of all doctors were women. “Our brand represents female empowerment,” argues Dickson. “It’s about choices. Barbie had careers at a time when women were restricted to being just housewives. Ironically, our critics are the very people who should embrace us.”

Mattel has also long claimed that Barbie has no influence on girls’ body image, pointing to whisper-thin models and even moms as the source of the dissatisfaction that too many young girls feel about their bodies. A handful of studies, however, suggest that Barbie does have at least some influence on what girls see as the ideal body. The most compelling, a 2006 study published in the journal Developmental Psychology, found that girls exposed to Barbie at a young age expressed greater concern with being thin, compared with those exposed to other dolls.

But it was only when moms started voting with their dollars that Mattel had to reassess these criticisms. In the mid-2000s Barbie faced her first serious competition after years of maintaining about 90% market share of the doll sector. Bratz, the edgy, bug-eyed dolls with their own smartphones and lip gloss, were “eating Barbie’s lunch in the older-girl demographic, and Disney Princess was chomping away at the younger-girl demographic,” explains Dickson. “Barbie was having an identity crisis.”

At first, this wasn’t a major problem for Mattel. Dickson was brought in in 2000 to expand the Barbie brand from dolls to apparel, TV shows and gaming. That’s when Barbie got her own interactive website. (She also has her own show that streams on Netflix.) The Barbie brand’s sales went up even as the doll’s sales sank. And Mattel as a whole prospered. The company was producing the Disney Princess dolls through a licensing deal, and to combat the Bratz problem, it created its own line of cutting-edge dolls, Monster High.

But in 2012, Barbie global sales dropped 3%. They dropped another 6% in 2013 and 16% in 2014. And the dominance of Frozen’s Elsa signals more trouble ahead. Even two years after the film’s release, the allure of Frozen hasn’t abated. At a Los Angeles Target, I locate Barbie in the toy aisle, beaming down at me from her dream house (pink convertible sold separately). On the next shelf over sits Elsa in a box that invites you to press a button to hear her sing. I press. As the doll begins to belt out the girl-power anthem “Let It Go,” children—girls and boys—come running from all directions screaming, dancing, one explaining to her mom why they need yet another variation of the Elsa doll in their house. I make a hasty retreat as the mother begins to look around for the idiot who started playing “Let It Go” in the toy aisle during the holiday season.

Therein lies Barbie’s problem. As much as Mattel has tried to market her as a feminist, Barbie’s famous figure has always overshadowed her business outfits. At her core, she’s just a body, not a character, a canvas upon which society can project its anxieties about body image. “Barbie has all this baggage,” says Jess Weiner, a branding expert and consultant who has worked with Dove, Disney and Mattel to create empowering messaging for girls. “Her status as an empowered woman has been lost.”

Part 3

With all that in mind, Kim Culmone, head of design, posed a challenge to her team:

If you could design Barbie today, how would you make her a reflection of the times? Out of that came changing Barbie’s face to have less makeup and look younger, giving her articulated ankles so she could wear flats as well as heels, giving her new skin tones to add diversity and then of course changing the body. While curvy Barbie’s hips, thighs and calves are visibly larger than before, from the waist up she is less Jessica Rabbit than she is pear-shaped. Mattel refuses to discuss the actual proportions of the new dolls or how it came to decide on them.

What’s clear in listening to the team discuss the project is that every step was taken on tiptoe. “It’s a personal issue because almost every woman has owned a Barbie, and every woman has some relationship with or opinion about Barbie,” says Culmone. During one meeting, designers, marketers and researchers fixated on the shoe problem. There will now be two Barbie shoe sizes, one for curvy and tall and another for original and petite. “We can’t label them 1, 2, because someone will read into that as saying one’s better than the other,” Barbie designer and former Project Runway contestant Robert Best explains. “Plus, we have to put the Barbie branding on every single object, and the shoes are so tiny.” They finally land on a B for one shoe size and Barbie’s face on the other. Moms will have to puzzle out which is which when they find a miniature stiletto jammed between their couch cushions.

Indeed, the additional bodies are a logistical nightmare. Mattel will sell the dolls exclusively on Barbie.com at first while it negotiates with retailers for extra shelf space to make room for the new bodies and their clothes alongside the original. There are a seemingly infinite number of combinations of hair texture, hair cut and color, body type and skin tone. And then there’s the issue of how to package the dolls. Mothers surveyed in Mattel focus groups expressed concern over giving the new dolls to their daughter or a friend of their daughter’s. What if a sensitive mom reads into the gift of a curvy doll a comment on her daughter’s weight? Mattel decided to sell the dolls in sets to avoid this problem, but then it had to figure out which dolls to sell together to optimize diversity and marketability.

“Yes, some people will say we are late to the game,” says Mazzocco. “But changes at a huge corporation take time.”

Part 4

“Hello, I’m a fat person, fat, fat, fat,”

A 6-year-old girl giving voice for the first time to curvy Barbie sings in a testing room at Mattel’s headquarters. Her playmates erupt in laughter.

When an adult comes into the room and asks her if she sees a difference between the dolls’ bodies, she modifies her language. “This one’s a little chubbier,” she says. Girls in other sessions are similarly careful about labels. “She’s, well, you know,” says an 8-year-old as she uses her hands to gesture a curvier woman. A shy 7-year-old refuses to say the word fat to describe the doll, instead spelling it out, “F, a, t.”

“I don’t want to hurt her feelings,” she says a little desperately.

As always, Barbie acts as a Rorschach test for the girls who play with her—and the adults who evaluate her. It’s a testament to anti-bullying curriculums in elementary schools that none of the girls would use words like fat in front of an adult, which Barbie’s research team says wasn’t true even three years ago. Still, the girls learning the ways of political correctness do not as wholeheartedly embrace the new dolls as their moms.

“We see it a lot. The adult leaves the room and they undress the curvy Barbie and snicker a little bit,” says Tania Missad, who runs the research team for Mattel’s girls portfolio. “For me, it’s these moments where it just really sets in how important it is we do this. Over time I would love it if a girl wouldn’t snicker and just think of it as another beautiful doll.”

It’s a sign that even kids as young as 6 or 7 are already conditioned for a particular silhouette in their dolls, and it highlights Mattel’s challenge. Mazzocco reflects on her experience with her daughters (two Barbie fans, one not) when she talks about the diversity imperative at the brand. “I do all kinds of things for my kids that they don’t like or understand, from telling them to do their homework to eating their vegetables,” she says. “This is very similar. It’s my responsibility to make sure that they have inclusivity in their lives even if it doesn’t register for them.”

Many of the mothers in the four focus groups that Mattel allows me to observe agree with the direction Mattel is taking. And they are, after all, the ones who buy the dolls. Though young moms might be the most vocal on social media when it comes to Barbie’s body, Mattel’s extensive surveys show that moms across the country care about diversity in terms of color and body, regardless of age, race or socioeconomic position. (The majority of the women in the focus groups I watched were middle class and African American or Hispanic.)

A Barbie prototype is pieced together at Mattel’s El Segundo, Calif., headquarters

“She’s cute thick,” offers one mom who says she has a 19-year-old son and two daughters, 3 and 5. “I have the hardest time finding clothes that are fitted and look good. It’s like if you’re bigger, you have to wear a sack. But she doesn’t look like that.” A mom sporting a tattoo says that she prefers buying My Little Pony toys to any sort of dolls to avoid the body-image issue altogether, and other mothers nod in agreement. Most say the new Barbie types would make them more likely to buy Barbie.

Some say Mattel didn’t go far enough. “I wish that she were curvier,” one woman wearing her uniform from her job at a restaurant complains. “There are shapes that are curvier and still are beautiful. My daughter definitely has curves, and I would want to give her a doll like that. It’s a start, I guess.”

And despite the girls who thought the curvy doll looked fat, most of the kids in the groups I observe choose their favorite doll or the doll that looks most like them based on hair, not body shape. A curvy, blue-haired doll that many girls dub Katy Perry is by far the most popular. But when asked which doll is Barbie, the girls invariably point to a blonde.

The idea that all these different dolls—none of whom look alike—can all be Barbie is confusing to moms too. “I brought my daughter to a Christmas-tree lighting with Santa and Barbie the other day,” says a mom in one of the focus groups. “If a black woman or a redheaded woman or a heavyset woman had shown up, my daughter would have been like, ‘Where’s Barbie?’” If Mattel takes away everything that makes Barbie an icon, is she still that icon? Companies work decades to create the sort of brand recognition that Barbie has. When people around the world close their eyes and think of Barbie, they see a specific body. If that body changes, Barbie could lose that status. Worse still, some customers may not like the new version. Too bad for them.

“Ultimately, haters are going to hate,” Dickson says. “We want to make sure the Barbie lovers love us more—and perhaps changing the people who are negative to neutral. That would be nice.”

hegieer

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