--- title: 'Fat' Barbie Could Be Our New Cultural Muse description: My hope is that children will bend Barbie to their own shapes, ones that escape the pink box canonical: https://time.com/4199977/new-barbie-cultural-muse/ author: Mona Awad article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-01-29T21:55:55.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:56:25.060Z article:section: Ideas og:title: 'Fat' Barbie Could Be Our New Cultural Muse og:description: My hope is that children will bend Barbie to their own shapes og:url: https://time.com/4199977/new-barbie-cultural-muse/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6f08f29a4828cf32/69887b410a4a22a7ac9c8210/barbie00001.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3000 og:image:height: 1688 og:image:alt: Barbie Approaches Her 50th Birthday og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 'Fat' Barbie Could Be Our New Cultural Muse twitter:description: My hope is that children will bend Barbie to their own shapes twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6f08f29a4828cf32/69887b410a4a22a7ac9c8210/barbie00001.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # 'Fat' Barbie Could Be Our New Cultural Muse > Sponsored content. 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Ian Waldie—Getty Images by [Mona Awad](https://time.com/author/mona-awad/) ## Mona Awad Jan 29, 2016 9:55 PM UTC I loved my Barbies though I never asked for them. My mother would line them up on the headboard of my princess bed. I still recall their chewed-up feet dangling over my eyes as I tried to sleep. When I woke up in the morning, the first thing I saw were her many blue eyes, her white smiles. Her impossible clothes that likely prompted my deep love of dresses, which I could not indulge in, being a fat girl. Given my weight, and my olive skin—thanks to my half-Egyptian heritage—I of course looked nothing like Barbie. Yet as a burgeoning storyteller, I found in Barbie my first muse, my first heroine, even though with her rigid limbs, her overtly sexualized body, her small feet that couldn’t possibly hold that body up and her fixed smile, there were only so many stories I could tell. Still, when I first began dabbling with writing stories as a child, my protagonists all had her physical features. So much so that my sixth grade teacher, coincidentally Arab herself, took me aside and expressed concern. I didn’t listen. I loved Barbie still. As a woman of mixed heritage who has struggled with body image issues all her life, I was excited when I first learned that Barbie was getting a body makeover, a racial makeover. I was scared, too. I often play a game with myself where I go back to my childhood when my body image issues were just emerging, and I imagine being presented with a female icon of another shape or shade—either on TV or a doll in my own hands. Would it have changed me? Would it have changed the stories I told through Barbie and thus to myself? Would I have valued the things I valued, worshipped blonde women as a child, become obsessed with dresses, Olivia Newton-John and Christie Brinkley? Would it have changed my own story? Would it have saved me from a lifetime of struggle with my own form, with feeling like an outsider? Thursday morning, I scrolled through the [many iterations of the new Barbie](http://time.com/barbie-new-body-cover-story/) in all her newfangled shapes and shades and hair textures, at once hopeful and afraid. At first, I felt comfort at the sight of her familiar face, her poised hands. There was my old toy. One of the first girl-shaped keys to my imagination. But then I saw that her eyes were still the same. Her hands were still stiff and pose-y, like she was about to present a game show prize or do ballet, an impossibility with her still too small and precarious feet. Her arms were still rigid and creepily unbendable. Her smile was still vapid and fixed. Her eyes weirdly blank and starry. That’s when I recalled the pink box in which she came and how every story I playfully performed with her, like a stiff-limbed marionette in my small hand, was inevitably a commercial version of a fairy tale—the one that ends in a kiss. Her form insisted upon it. The protagonist of my novel, [_13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl_](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143128485/?tag=timecom-20), Lizzie, struggles to lose weight and become Barbie thin. She believes that, by changing her body, she will transform herself. Her realm of possibility will broaden. She will be happy, she will be different. Her story will change. Lizzie does change her body. She even changes her name. She transforms herself into someone who can, though not without difficulty, wear the Barbie dresses I so coveted as a chubby child. And yet, even though she attains physical transformation, she still encounters the same demons. She cannot escape her problematic self. When I look into the still vacuous eyes of the new “fat” Barbie, I see that [Barbie can’t escape herself](http://time.com/4196777/barbie-feminist-filipovic/) either, regardless of changes made to her height, waist, hips and skin tone. (Though I do love her new blue hair). Like my own protagonist, Lizzie, Barbie cannot transcend what she is composed of—not molded plastic, but rather the anxieties, desires, and dreams of her makers, which invite a kind of impossible happily-ever-after narrative, narrow and eerily dreamy and irresistible at the same time. Barbie will always be Barbie. But in as much as she appears to be an immoveable icon, locked in her own pink box, she is also a toy. And thus still a powerful key to the imagination. She was and always will be a story prompt. And with her unreal features, however implausible and lunatic in their construction, a warped window into a fictive world. So maybe change is possible after all. Not perhaps for Barbie, trapped as she is in her hollow, plastic persona. Nor can it be sparked by her corporate creators. Instead, I look to those who play with her. The children who are at this very moment casting new Barbie in their own narratives, their own playtime scenarios. My hope is that the children who play with Barbie now, children who are made dreamy by her dreamy blue hair, who are now hesitant to call fat Barbie “fat,” children with a more culturally evolved awareness of beauty and health, of greater narrative possibilities for girls, will bend Barbie to their own shapes, ones that escape the pink box. I only hope she can accommodate them. ## Transcript Hi, okay, let's see. Where should I start? Barbie is a symbol of femininity and pop culture. Barbie as a brand is scrutinized to a degree that a lot of toy brands aren't. They suck You know, it's kinda tough sometimes to sit down and really hear. Barbie isn't as popular as she used to be. And listen and kinda take in the truth. It was obvious that there is some work that we need to do. About two years ago we launched a project internally that was a brainstorming project and. We said to our teams, if you could start the brand over today and you didn't have any rules. You could do whatever you wanted. What would you do to make her as relevant as possible. The Barbie brand is introducing three new bodies. Now they can look at Body types from tall to petite to curvy. For the first time really there's a significant change. [ MUSIC ] Now our decision to go on this journey to really evolve the brand was inspired by many things. Of course it was inspired by softness in sales. [ MUSIC ] Let the storm rage on. The cold never bothered me anyway. My gosh I love this song. [ MUSIC ] Everything is awesome. Everything is cool when you're part of the team. Everything is awesome. Of course it was inspired by Laura seeing on social media about Barbie. You know, does she really know what's happening in the world today. She seems a little out of touch. [ MUSIC ] Of course, it was driven by moms and Saying like I don't think that Barbie really speaks to me. And Millennial parents more so probably than any generation of parents are really concerned about what brands signify in their household. I think some of the things that parents were saying about Barbie is that she might be a bad role model for girls, that she represents an unrealistic body type. There are lots of theories around why Barbie gets So much criticism. The same reason that women in general get so much criticism. Some of it is valid. If this is a doll that people say it's a role model and very young children are playing with that, there is a great responsiblity to that and I don't think it's a responsiblity Mattel takes lightly at all. There was a sense that Barbie maybe was not As authentic as she could be as relates to, you know we're fact it was happening to the world. [ SOUND ] [ MUSIC ] There was absolutely no No, a prescription for the divine feet. So, truly the whole design brace was, what would you do to make her relevant? We've been introducing new skin colors. New hair colors. New hair textures. New ethnicity Because as you look around the world and I think that the world that kids are experiencing, is really one that is multicultural and diverse. So Project Don which I think is the next evolution, is to look at body sizes from tall to Too petite, too curvy. And when you seem them all together, it looks like this tribe of young girls the way a kid might see that reflected in their own circle of friends or Or their family or at school. We're disrupting a system of play that has existed for a very long time. It is very complicated. We now have two sizes of feet. So our tall doll and our curvy doll have a larger foot than our original and our petite. We have clothes that may not fit perfectly across all of the dolls. [ MUSIC ] We are in a position of progress, not perfection right now and that's okay. [ MUSIC ] And so while this might not have been the most important signifier of the change. And not answering all of that critique. I think it's a nod to the complex ecosystem of what's happening for girls and toys and play and growing up girl in our culture right now. Women and girls are much more comfortable and confident in expressing who they are as individuals. [ MUSIC ] Our goal was to really celebrate all kinds of beauty and a blond haired, blue eyed doll like Barbie is still beautiful. Just like now the more curvier Barbie with dark hair and darker skin is just as beautiful. [ MUSIC ] You can tell it's Mattel. 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