In the 1950s, most children’s dolls depicted babies. But when Handler, an industrial designer, noticed her daughter Barbara preferred to play with cutouts of older figures, she adapted a sexy German doll and created “Barbie”.
Executives at Mattel, which Handler helped start, were dubious at first, but in 1959, Barbie’s first year, 351,000 dolls sold, and to date more than a billion have been sold. While some decry Barbie’s impossibly curvy figure, Handler once said the “whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be. Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices. Over and over I’ve had it said to me by women [that] she was much more than a doll for them. She was part of them.”
Later, after a bout with breast cancer, Handler found she could not find a suitable prosthetic breast, so she formed a company to market her own design, which she dubbed “Nearly Me”. She died April 27 in California from complications after abdominal surgery. She was 85.
Author’s Note: Barbie figured prominently in another of my projects, the True Stella Awards(!).