In December 2005 the University of Bath released research on young girls’ disavowals of their Barbies, branding it a “rite of passage and a rejection of their past” which came in forms as diverse as the classic shaven head to the more off-the-wall decision of some 7-to-11-year-olds to microwave their dolls. It is, perhaps, somewhat surprising that actual academic research had to be done to figure out that destroying old Barbies was a tweenage millenial rite of passage. Almost every conversation I’ve had with female friends in the wake of the news of Barbie’s transformation in the past week has ended in discussions of how we lovingly mutilated our treasured dolls once we had decided they were no longer worth playing with. A favourite of mine was full body tattoos in various shades of sparkly nail polish, but it’s a question of personal taste.
That Barbie’s sales have been falling for nearly five years now is hardly a massive shock: she’s barely changed since her ‘birth’ in March 1959 when Ruth Handler sensed a gap in the toy market for more adult-looking dolls. Handler based Barbie’s body on a German doll called Lilli who had risen to prominence via artist Reinhard Beuthien’s cartoons and was what one might call an adult novelty toy.

Barbie’s manufacturing company, Mattel, suffered a painful 59 per cent drop in profits last year, leading to the sacking of the chairman and chief executive Bryan Stockton. In 2014 Frozen’s Elsa doll beat Barbie as the top-selling doll, while Lego overtook Mattel (who also sell Hot Wheels and Polly Pocket) as the top-selling toy brand.

The first major change for Barbie (apart from a temporary split from Ken in 2004) came last year, when Mattel introduced 23 new dolls to its Fashionistas line. The dolls had more varied skin and hair colours and, most excitingly, had actual flat feet as opposed to the weird semicircle things Barbies had before. For the first time in her 56 years, Barbie could wear flats. The big news now is that versions of Barbie are being released with actual curves. Supposedly, that is.

Under the codename ‘Project Dawn’, a team at Mattel has spent two whole years revamping the classic Barbie shape to make it sellable to what Evelyn Mazzocco, head of the Barbie brand, has called the ‘millenial mom’ (millenial dads don’t buy kids toys, in case you were wondering). This is all very well and good. Some change is better than no change, I guess. But the picture changes if we take a step away from the hype and consider some of the numbers involved in this year’s new Barbie Fashionista line. There are 33 new dolls, 30 hair colours, 24 hairstyles, 22 eye colours, 14 face shapes, seven skin tones, four body shapes. Notice how, curiously, the numbers go down as we get to the important stuff we’re all supposed to be excited about.

Barbie now comes in four body shapes: original, tall, curvy and petite. There are more than a couple of issues here: for starters, curvy Barbie looks like a size 12/14 whilst the average UK size is 16. There are also problems with the categorisation of Barbie’s body - she is either tall or curvy or petite but never more than one, which gives an underlying suggestion that it’s somehow okay for there to be one deviation from the ‘original’ but that’s it. Ladies, you can be ‘fat’, that’s cool, but just don’t think about being short at the same time.

Equally, the norm for Barbie hasn’t changed. Barbie ‘original’ still has such unrealistic proportions that if she were a real life woman she probably wouldn’t be able to lift her six-times-bigger-than-her-waist head and would be 5ft 9 but under eight stone and so lacking the BMI normally needed to have regular periods. Does this really mark change from the 1963 Barbie which came with a diet book with just one piece of advice: ‘don’t eat’?
Holding up the changes announced last week as if they’re some brilliant progressive move on Mattel’s part just doesn’t make sense. Ultimately they’re just matching modern consumer demands and desperately trying to reverse their falling sales while repackaging it as some bold new move. A bolder move would be dolls which are actually curvy and maybe really tall, too. Or with some kind of non-superficial physical disability. Or a Ken that questions male body expectations – Dad-bod Ken, perhaps.
The new Fashionista range only reflects changes that have already happened in consumers’ expectations; it’s a weak nod to the rise of pop culture feminism in the last five years. This is fair enough: Mattel employs 28,000 people worldwide and needs to keep profits up. But what this means is that last week’s unveiling of new Barbie isn’t really a story about Mattel but, rather, one about the important - if still only partial – ways in which our expectations of representations of the female body have begun to change.