Doll with a past
Dear Barbie,
First: I would like to stay with you, if it does not bother you. We have not had anything to do with each other for a while, but we have known each other since childhood. Of course, my childhood days. You were never a kid. You have always been ready. Always perfect.
With this Sauberfrau image, you have not only made friends in recent decades. "Barbie gives the impression that the female role is limited to visits to beauty and hairdressing salons, parties and hours of dreaming," warned educators. For a long time, my mother steadfastly refused to buy her daughter a doll that could not even stand on her own legs. She was probably right - but also underestimated how penetrating a seven-year-old can be. I took advantage of a weak moment - and then I was finally in, in the pink Barbie world.
For a while you've gotten pretty in my nursery, with all your horses, dogs and cats. You could never have enough clothes. Only when I gave you a generous house (with a swimming pool!) Did you lean back halfway contentedly on your four-poster bed.
I was young, I wanted to be seduced. You were a great projection surface for my little girl dreams. To this day, this seductive power is almost unbroken: In Germany, every girl has an average of seven clones of you, worldwide, three more go over the counter per second.
The American businesswoman Ruth Handler would not have dreamed that, when she discovered you in the 50s in Lucerne and reinvented her. At that time you were still called Lilli and you were a very two-dimensional comic book, printed in the "Bild" newspaper. Your new creator Americanized you thoroughly, put on a striped bathing suit, put on your sunglasses - and finally gave you the name of her daughter. On March 9, 1959, as Barbie, you saw the light of the toy world. So you're going to be 50 this year. You can not see it. You have often put yourself under the knife too: Your breasts were enlarged (later reduced again), widened your hips, narrowed the waist, there was a comprehensive facelift several times - a total of over 500 surgeries!
The most beautiful looks from 50 years Barbie
All this not only for aesthetic reasons, but above all to keep up with the times. You were hippie and yuppie, punk and popper, today you can either buy as SMS or superstar Barbie, small cell phone or mini-recording studio included.
In a flash, you react to what society wants. That's why you could scold you for being an incorrigible opportunist, but then ignore that you're always making the prevailing zeitgeist visible. Fashion designers such as Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior or Pierre Cardin recognized this early, discovered you as a style icon and designed miniature collections for you.
Nevertheless, you have never thought of only the next season, but always further. Your critics may disagree, but emancipation was a topic for you. You've made a career as a doctor, astronaut, teacher, nurse, ballerina, pilot, stewardess and firefighter. At the turn of the millennium you acted even as President Barbie (in stock in several skin colors!). Soon you also have geared yourself globally and you looking for friends with a migration background: the dark-skinned Francie, Lea, the Asian, or Leyla, the Arab woman. So you have proven that it does not have to be stupid who is blond. (Okay, when you learned to speak, meaningless sentences like "Ken is a super type" came out of your mouth.) But you have to explain the thing about Ken to me. Why did you leave him first for this beach boy Blaine, but two years later he closed it again in your plastic arms? I never really understood what you could do with this sonny boy with the sculpted hair. Officially, he did not even have a penis.
Anyway, I found the guys from my class at some point more exciting than Ken and, yes, as well as you - and found that life could be much pinker than your ball gown from organza. But sometimes also frighteningly colorless.
Your Sina Teigelkötter
