Walkin', talkin', livin' Barbie
dolls By Abigail Paris
As Fashion Week gets underway in New York
City this week, it is worth asking where models'
standards of beauty come from.
Our story
starts with the Barbie doll, whose US sales have
dropped 12% this quarter, leading Mattel to pin
its hopes on markets abroad. Since her
introduction at the 1959 Toy Fair in New York,
Barbie's ultrafeminine plastic figure has climbed
to number 43 on the list of 101 Most Influential
People Who Never Lived.
A topic of
controversy, Barbie's frame in life-size
proportions would have a bust between 38 and 40
inches, a waist between 18 and 24 inches, hips
between 33 and 35 inches, and a weight of
just
over 50 kilograms. Such a body would force her to
walk on all fours.
When the competing Emme
doll by Tonner Doll came on to the market in 2002
with significantly more reasonable proportions it
looked like Barbie might have to gain some weight.
Unfortunately for Emme, her sales were a fraction
of Barbie's annual $1.5 billion. About 1.5 million
Barbie dolls are sold every week.
In the
Middle East, Barbie dolls have disappeared from
toy store shelves. In their place is Fulla, a
dark-eyed doll with Barbie-like proportions,
wearing a black abaya or a head scarf and
embodying "Muslim values". For China, Yue-Sai Kan,
creator and founder of Yue-Sai Kan Cosmetics,
created an Asian version of Barbie, the Wa Wa. The
doll's face has a wider, flatter nose, darker
eyes, a porcelain skin tone, and a thinner body.
Wa Wa, Fulla, and Barbie have three things
in common: They are all made out of plastic, they
are all considered beautiful, and they all have
dramatically low weights. Strutting in parallel
are the thin models fashion designers choose for
their catwalks and ad campaigns.
The
fashion industry is known for selling mod dresses
and $1,000 stiletto heels. But it is also selling
the ideal of beauty embodied by the models that
wear the designs.
Thin and pale may be the
dominant aesthetic standard of global fashion, but
preferences for ideal female frame and color
differ dramatically around the world. Many
cultures value the voluptuous and associate it
with health and motherhood, while other cultures
see richness of skin tone and a long neck as
symbols of wealth or status. Translation of the
famous song The Girl from Ipanema
illustrates one of these cultural differences. In
the English version, the lyrics describe the girl
as "tall and tan and young and lovely", while in
Portuguese the emphasis is not on her height or
youth, but on her graceful swaying hips.
Diversity does not flourish in the fashion
industry, as the Wall Street Journal noted
recently. In the presentations of designers'
spring 2008 collections no more than one third
employed black models. "Modeling is probably the
one industry where you have the freedom to refer
to people by their color and reject them in their
work," said Bethann Hardison, a former model who
runs an agency that promotes diversity.
The fashion industry as a whole is
resisting change. Many argue that it is necessary
for models to look alike, almost robotic, with
blank features and indistinct body characteristics
that don't compete with the clothes.
But
formal rules were recently passed in Spain,
requiring models to achieve an objective measure
of health. The Council of Fashion Designers of
America, following in Spain's footsteps, has
issued guidelines to designers to promote
healthier behavior, including the identification
of models with eating disorders and the addition
of nutritious backstage catering.
On the
low model weight issue, designer Diane von
Furstenberg says the industry "should promote
health as a part of beauty rather than setting
rules". Designers in France assert that a
formalized response is not necessary. They argue
that existing labor laws require foreign models to
be registered with local agencies, and that these
agencies are charged with the role of identifying
models with eating disorders.
The days of
anorexic-thin models are not coming to an end as
swiftly as physicians or anthropologists or Spain
would like. When it comes to beauty, does
globalize equal homogenize? Perhaps someday the
plastic doll or the model will mirror diverse and
obtainable standards. Because women's health is on
the line, it's interesting to note that Ruth
Handler, the creator of Barbie (named after her
daughter, Barbara and based on a German doll, Bild
Lilli) went on to invent "Nearly Me", the first
prosthesis with a natural slope for breast cancer
survivors after she underwent a modified radical
mastectomy.
(Published with permission of
the Global Policy Innovations
program at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in
International Affairs.
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