Barbie, the most famous doll in the world, symbol of American girl-hood, and now the star of a feature film, carries with her, along with many accessories, a complicated origin story. The official Mattel history holds that Barbie was born in 1959, when creator and Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler observed her daughter playing for hours with paper figures and spotted a chance to “champion and inspire girls” by providing them with a three-dimensional doll.
The less salubrious version traces the inspiration for Barbie to a European holiday where Handler encountered the wildly popular Bild Lilli, a leggy blonde doll sold in tobacconist shops to adults as a. Lilli was a sassy escort, the star of every bar who was often stopped by the police for wearing too little. Handler initially couldn’t get Mattel to produce a grown-up doll with breasts, but her project took off after bringing home Bild Lilli. Manufacturing of her doll, which she called Barbie, began in Japan, a country experiencing its own postwar agonies about sex, innocence, and girls’ bodies. Mattel acquired the rights to Bild Lilli in 1964.
