Why Barbie Has Always Been More Than Just a Toy

These interviews took place prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike.

When was the last time you played with a Barbie? Your instinct may be to laugh this off. Barbies are for kids after all. But Margot Robbie, who stars in the new Barbie movie, has thoughts on the matter.

“First we made Barbie and we loved Barbie, and then we hated Barbie. And now I think we’re realizing – or I’m realizing – it’s not about Barbie. It’s about us,” she tells IGN. “That was a weirdly profound journey to go on.

What the actress is getting at is the sort of nebulousness of who Barbie really is. More than a doll, she’s come to represent a collection of social norms, pressures and expectations. Like a plastic Pygmalion, we created this perfect woman and fell in love with her. But Robbie is right, we grew wary of her too.

We spoke to the cast of Barbie ahead of the film’s release about the massive impact this one doll has had on pop culture. So let’s dig into how Barbie has always been more than just a toy.

“I’ll be honest,” the film’s co-star Kate McKinnon tells us. “When I was younger, I feel like Barbie represented to me convention and a set of rules in which I did not have a place, and I felt kind of alienated by it.”

The genius of the Barbie movie, though, is that it manages to take this doll that we all assumed we’d grown past and finds ways to make her relevant to us once again. For those of us who grew up playing with dolls, Barbie became something of a taboo in adolescence – a signal of lingering childishness. 

“I’ll never forget being in second grade and proudly saying that I play with Barbies and then a group of girls being like, you still play with Barbies?” recalls co-star Issa Rae. “And then the feeling of just shame and rejecting Barbie after that.”

It’s interesting to hear director Greta Gerwig describe her relationship with Barbies, especially now that she’s brought to life one of the most nuanced interpretations of what Barbie means to society today. As toys, dolls represent a blank slate. They’re characters in unwritten stories, props in childhood fantasy. To Gerwig, they were her earliest performers. 

Looking back, I can see that part of what I was doing was directing with my dolls. -Greta Gerwig

“I played with dolls until too late,” says the director. “I mean, too late because I didn’t want people at school to know that I still played with dolls, because it was like junior high school when kids started being cool and I still played with dolls. … Not just Barbies but dolls in general were really big for me. And I think now looking back, I can see that part of what I was doing was directing with my dolls.”

But Barbie herself isn’t a blank slate. She does mean something to everyone, good, bad, and everything in between. Gerwig’s mission here is a reorientation of Barbie in our cultural consciousness. For kids, this film is a new story about a favorite toy. But for adults, it’s taking her out of the toybox after years of collecting dust. 

Barbie Before Barbie

In the opening scene of the film, we begin with Barbie’s inception, a campy homage to the Dawn of Man sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Barbie first burst onto the market in 1959, clad in the iconic black-and-white bathing suit we see in the opening moments of the film. What most don’t know, however, was that she was modeled on a German doll originally geared toward adults. 

Known as the Bild Lilli doll, the character that inspired Barbie creator Ruth Handler came from comics which ran in a German newspaper. Lilli was svelte and flirtatious on the page, and eventually was manufactured into a novelty doll and purchased as gag gifts by German men. It’s an odd sort of metamorphosis, a doll for adults inspiring a doll for children. It’s a messy sort of feminism too. While Barbie helped to codify Eurocentric beauty standards into U.S. consumer culture, she was ultimately one of the first toys girls had to picture adulthood beyond the societal goal of child-rearing. 

“Greta really was the one that pointed [it] out for me,” says Robbie. “She’s like, Barbie went to the moon before women were allowed credit cards. And you’re like, oh yeah. Barbie did all this stuff at a time when they could not have any financial autonomy in their lives. Surely that infiltrated our collective mind in some way and made us go, hmm, I want a Dreamhouse, I want my own house, I want my own car. I want to do whatever job I want to do.”

That’s right: The Miss Astronaut Barbie was introduced in the My Favorite Career collection in 1965 while women didn’t gain the right to open credit cards independently until 1974. It was admirable of the brand to look ahead, to convince young girls of a future where they too might reach for the stars.

Barbie’s Cultural Impact

Despite all of its optimism, it’s undeniable that Barbie the brand wasn’t always an inclusionary one. 

“Growing up I was not a Barbie girl,” says co-star America Ferrera. “I didn’t play with Barbies. I couldn’t afford Barbies, you know, and it was just very aspirational and not within reach for me. I just didn’t necessarily feel reflected in that world.”

Ferrera plays Gloria in the film, a Mattel employee struggling to connect with her teen daughter. What Ferrera draws attention to here is the way Barbie contributed to social stratification along lines of class, race, and gender. Let’s be clear: No doll exists in a vacuum. It’s not like Barbie herself created the concept of inequality, but she’s not entirely safe from it either. It’s great she gave girls a vision of opportunity, but for years she also inadvertently contributed to a beauty standard that upheld whiteness and thinness above all.

Beyond what Barbie came to represent, she fell into a strict binary of “boy toys” versus “girl toys” so pervasive and yet so incredibly silly. The idea is that gender can somehow define interest, that girls and boys are genetically wired to prefer colors, characters, activities and more based on nothing more than an identity assigned to them at birth. Take McDonald’s years-long practice of packing their Happy Meals based on the question “Do you want a girl toy or a boy toy?” At first glance, it’s an inconsequential slight – something annoying to deal with if, for instance, you’re a little girl who loves the color blue. But it’s also the first stirrings of social conditioning which deems women more docile and incapable and frivolous than men. 

I mean, There’s a reason people have held disdain for anything they deem too “girly.”

“I came from a generation where boys didn’t play with Barbies,” says co-star Simu Liu. “Boys played with action figures and He-Man and Power Rangers and girls played with Barbie. And the very kind of heteronormative lens of that was like ‘oh no!’ It was gross. It would be gross! Like: I don’t want to play with that, ew. And I think and I hope that the world has evolved quite a bit since then.”

In some ways it has. Mattel has made its own efforts at curbing historical exclusion. In 1968, nearly 10 years after Barbie hit shelves, the company issued their first Black Barbie doll – a “friend” of Barbie’s named Christie. In 1980, they took it a step further by releasing the first-ever Black Barbie. Designed by Kitty Black Perkins, this wasn’t “Barbie’s friend Christie.” This was Barbie, and she was Black. 

In 2016, Mattel released the Barbie Fashionistas line, which included three new body types: curvy, petite and tall. Since then, the line has expanded to include Barbies and Kens who use wheelchairs, prosthetics and more. The line’s product description reads:

Barbie and Ken Fashionistas celebrate diversity with fashion dolls that encourage real-world storytelling and open-ended dreams!

Barbie Is for Everyone

Gerwig’s films seeks to reclaim Barbie for everyone, to give her a new meaning that builds atop all of our ideas of who she is without saying “No, you’ve always been wrong about Barbie.”

“Coming out the other end of this Barbie journey, it’s been really wonderful to get to be a part of the expansion of the Barbie narrative where it includes more of us now and where the story has expanded to where we get to be a part of it,” says Ferrera. “And not because we’ve changed, but because the story has changed, right?”

“The movie sort of forces a shift in perspective and a taking back of what Barbie represents or makes you feel about yourself,” says co-star Michael Cera. Adds Simu Liu, “No Barbie ever judges another Barbie. You know, no Barbie ever puts another Barbie down.”

It’s been really wonderful to get to be a part of the expansion of the Barbie narrative where it includes more of us now. -America Ferrera

The Barbieland of Gerwig’s film is aspirational. It’s every dream of childhood uninhibited by the anxieties of adulthood. It’s a place where your abilities as a leader aren’t questioned because of your gender. It’s a place where you don’t have to apologize for your success. Sure, it’s not perfect, but it’s a place that you can dream. 

“I just kept trying to remember that all the time when I was making this movie,” says Gerwig. “I was like, what did Little Greta like and want and think? The truth is, tapping into that is also tapping into some version of yourself that’s sometimes more fearless, who we are at eight than who we are later.”

Really, Barbie has always been more than just a doll. She’s a receptacle for love and anger, creativity and irritation. She creates culture just as culture creates her and she’s become a larger-than-life symbol of what it means to be a kid. 

“If you’re owning Barbie, if you want to be a Barbie, there’s a sense of confidence that you’re also exerting,” says Rae. “For me there’s a bravery in accepting Barbie, and so now I proudly claim her.”

After this summer, it’s entirely possible Barbie will go back to the toybox. But for now, she really is everything.