"Barbie has been both forward-thinking and a behind-the-times image of womanhood"

As the new Barbie film catapults the doll back into the cultural spotlight, Robin Gerber explores the toy's origins - and the sometimes controversial ways in which it has depicted wider social values

- By Robin Gerber

Barbie was born, so to speak, in 1959 - and revolutionised dolls instantly. Up to that point, there really was no adult doll for little girls to play with. It was the genius of Ruth Handler [co-founder and, later, president of toy manufacturer Mattel, who created Barbie] to realise that little girls wanted to play at being big girls. She came to the idea by watching her own daughter play with paper dolls. They were very frustrating to play with the little paper tabs were always tearing off or not really connecting, so the clothes fell off all the time - but they allowed you to pretend to be an adult. That is still, to this day, what keeps Barbie so popular. It's estimated that one sells somewhere around the world every few seconds.

Barbie does have a sexy shape, but that was purely accidental. Handler couldn't get her design team to make the kind of dolls she had in mind. They said: don't be ridiculous - mothers will never buy a doll with breasts. But then, in Switzerland, she saw an adult doll called Lilli, and she knew it was what she wanted her design team to make. I think if she had seen a doll that wasn't so sexy, that would have been okay, too - it just happened that Lilli was the doll she found that she could buy, bring back and copy.

Lilli had started as a sexy-looking cartoon character in popular German newspaper Bild Zeitung. The cartoon was very popular with men, so it makes sense that a toy was developed that men could buy for bachelor parties, or hang from the rearview mirror of their car. That doll proved attractive to children and eventually worked its way into toy stores, where Handler saw it.