Barbie has brought joy to my family since 1961

When I was still in single digits in 1961, my best friend’s name was Barbara Millicent Roberts. You know her by her nickname: Barbie.

Mattel introduced Barbie, “the teen fashion doll!” to the world on March 9, 1959. She came in two versions, blonde and brunette. Made to a sixth human scale, she was 11.5 centimeters tall, which made her about the height of a six-foot-two woman. Her vinyl skin had a pinkish-beige hue, the color of unbleached silk. She cost three dollars and her clothes and accessories were sold separately, with prices ranging from one to five dollars. That first year, Mattel released 22 outfits for their new doll.

The Barbie my parents bought me in 1961 wore the now-famous black and white striped zebra bathing suit that showed off her chubby figure and wasp waist. Her painted fingernails matched her red lipstick and her blue eyes turned to the left, matching the hauteur of the runway model she was meant to be. Her hair, which Mattel called “Titian,” was the color of a sparkly new penny.

Before Barbie, most dolls were modeled after babies. But Barbie’s inventor, Ruth Handler, said she wanted Mattel to make a more mature doll for girls to project their own dreams on.

That may have been Handler’s goal, but I was more interested in Barbie’s clothes than what she would do while wearing them. Her outfits were so glamorous! They all looked like they could have been worn by Audrey Hepburn: her little black dress had a continuous line to “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”; her posh trench belonged in “Charade.”

The clothes were also exquisitely tailored: made of fine fabrics with finished seams and assembled with miniature snaps, zippers and tiny buttons to make them manageable for little fingers. Coats were lined in satin, evening gowns were visions in taffeta and tulle, ball gowns were resplendent in brocade. Until about 1967, Barbie and her clothes were machine-made in Japan and hand-finished by Japanese housewives who added the little embellishments.

As much as I loved dressing my Barbie in her store-bought outfits, I also enjoyed making her own clothes. After raiding my mother’s storehouse of rickrack and ribbons, I used her pinking shears to cut material and became proficient with glue, no sewing required. I even made a barbie-sized bed for my doll by gluing together pieces of balsa wood, then making sheets, blankets, and pillows from stray fabric. I also dove into my mom’s vast collection of miniatures—furniture, kitchenware, tableware—to build dioramas where Barbie could show off her clothes.

In 1965, as our family moved from one leafy Toronto neighborhood to another, I packed up my Barbie and her finery. She didn’t come out to play again until the early 1970s, when my older sister’s two daughters, Anne and Lise, were reaching their teens.

By then I was in college and my mother was the keeper of my doll and her various accoutrements. She invited Anne and Lise to play with my vintage Barbie within the confines of her living room coffee table, warning them to be “very careful” with her. Like me, Anne and Lise built houses and filled them with furniture they made. They created flowy ball gowns for Barbie from Kleenex.

By the time Anne and Lise became teenagers, they had their own Barbies, as well as Ken dolls (something I never had) in both “normal and Malibu” versions, as well as PJ and Skipper dolls. Times had changed since I was a child. Their dolls had ‘a lot’ of sex, Lise recalls. “Barbie always got it done.”

When Anne and Lise were about 15, my vintage Barbie retired again. She didn’t reappear until my own daughter, Em, was in grade school. For her, playing with Barbie was “all about the clothes, about making different outfits,” she says. We shared the joy of buying her new clothes. We have fond memories of wet feet on dewy July mornings at a farmer’s market in the Madawaska Valley, where a local woman sold crocheted clothes custom-made for our doll. Should we get the sheath in ivory or bubble gum pink?

Em, now a graduate student living in another city, told me I’d find the old Barbies in plastic bins under her bed. I dug out the dolls and their clothes and spread them out in her old room. On a recent visit to the house, she saw them and “fell under Barbie’s spell” for two hours, brushing the dolls’ hair and tidying up their clothes.

“It was really meditative,” she said. “I couldn’t sit on my phone because I needed both hands to put the Velcro on the clothes – I was in this little Barbie world in my room. As a 30-year-old woman, it was a revelation to understand that you can could play with the toys you loved as a child.”

She later told me, “I look forward to playing with your Barbie one day with a daughter of my own.”

When the time comes, Barbie, who still looks radiant at 62, will be ready.

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