What makes an image iconic?

INDEX

THE MAKING OF AN ICON 3

QUOTATIONS 9

BIBLIOGRAPHY 10

What makes an image iconic?

The idea for Barbie was originated by Ruth Handler, the woman who founded the American company Mattel with her husband Elliot. They created the doll in 1959 and named her Barbie after their daughter Barbara. Barbie's long-standing boyfriend was launched in 1961 after the arrival of their son called Ken.

The Barbie was introduced as the teenage fashion model and was a great success, selling 350,000 in the first year. Soon the company gets the profit of 100 million dollars a year. However, the Barbie was almost a direct copy of a German post-war doll named Lilli, which was sold as a pornographic plaything for men.

This success was given mainly for the marketing research that they used. They always know what their customers want. They always keep the doll fresh with the endless variety of new products: costumes, accessories and identities like friends, family members, and pets. She is constantly up to date. Her skin color and nationality varies a lot from Indian to Japanese. But the body’s doll is always the same. Every year she gets 120 new outfits and a new career. This reflects the changing of styles through the years. By the middle of sixties, just some years after her launch, Mattel was the biggest clothing manufacturer in the world with just only one model.

Placed in the world of fantasy by virtue of her perfect body and endless cash flow, Barbie also lives there by virtue of having occupations and even vacations having visible work. Nevertheless Barbie also lives in the world of reality, especially the worlds of youth culture specifically and popular culture generally. She is attuned to fashion, music, and leisure trends.

Barbie was Nurse, Reporter, Dentist, Police, doctor, politicians, astronauts, veterinarian, rock star, Unicef ambassador, scuba diver, artist, baseball player and so on. There was nothing she might not become. Everything was in the outfit. Barbie is anything and everything. Even her physical form can be remodeled and remade. We girls can do anything! This was Mattel's slogan for the Eighties.

“Barbie’s style might be called emphatic femininity. It takes feminine appearances and demeanor to unsustainable extremes. Nothing about Barbie ever looks masculine, even when she is on the police force.”1 This femininity is given for Barbie’s packaging, soft and billowing fabrics, appropriate clothes for different circumstances and shapely figure but also as well a proper manner on being “nice, soft-spoken, polite, helpful and sensitive.”2

Barbie implies that women can succeed in masculine domains while remaining feminine.

“Adorable, billowy, breathtaking, charming, chic, dazzling, delicate, dramatic, elegant and exquisite, fanciful, fashionable and fetching, glamorous and glittering, graceful, lovely, radiant, regal, romantic, ...

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Barbie implies that women can succeed in masculine domains while remaining feminine.

These were the adjectives used to describe the Barbie doll in advertising. Also is this connotation that make her an icon of the femininity related with the middle reaches of contemporary Western societies.

Through the years there was always some polemics around Barbie influences. She may be a universally recognised image, she can represents in a child's imagination life can be as personal as an idol. According to her creator, Ruth Handler, “ Designed Barbie with a blank face, so that the child could project her own dreams of the future on to Barbie.”4 She wanted as well that the owner could create a personality for the doll. “Each of us has a unique interpretation of who she really is.”5 Moreover, according with Cassidy Park, vice president of Barbie design and development in the US, “ far from being a brainless glamour-girl glamour girl, Barbie is a young woman of her times, a role model making today’s girls aware of the vast number of careers available”6.

This is a good point of view in relation to the development of the child. But it has at the same time as well a lot of contradictions with wrong body notions based on an artificial model. “Listen to some girls who attend Marsden Middle School, an inner-city school in a small Midwestern city whose students are mostly African American pre-adolescents from low-income households. Latisha says, “ Barbie is nice to look at. When I place her on the shelf, I just look at her because she is so pretty.” And another girl called Desiree, says Barbie “used to be my idol. Like I wanted to be like her.” 7 According with Brian Sutton-Smith in the first five years for children, they are particularly dependent on the comfort of the toy world and as well that a toy can become an identity around which the Childs organises his or her actions and concepts of the world. Those actions and concepts often reflect less the child’s freedom to imagine and more the cultural scripts encoded in favorite playthings. Toys like Barbie dolls invite children to think about adulthood, gender, class, and other identity attaching realities in decidedly narrow ways. And also, that wearing the right clothes and acquiring beautiful things will confer status, self-respect, and happiness.

The negative point concerning about the Barbie’s figure is that her body is completely distorted and impossible to be real, so that artificial image does affect a young person. The young target of Barbie doll is from 3 until 11 years old. At this stage of their development, they get the notion that the ideal woman figure is this ultra slim body, extremely materialistic; look glamorous in high heels, big breasts, pretty with long hair and mainly with typically blond with blue eyes. This feminine archetype could affect negatively the natural grow up. But is important to make sure that they understand that is not possible to look like Barbie, and that Barbie is an artificial body image that should not be given to children. With that, Barbie’s unnaturally shape provoked feminists to complain that she was an impossible and undesirable role model for girls. Artists used her in their work, sometimes provoking legal action from Mattel, but Barbie continued to defy criticism and sell in her millions, becoming the world's best-selling doll.

Many girls who grow up with a Barbie are growing up with a strange notion of what a woman should look like. A good example to demonstrate this negative point is the recent study at the University of Arizona that investigated the attitudes of white and black teenage girls concerning about body image. Ninety per cent of the white girls expressed dissatisfaction with their own bodies and many said they saw dieting as a kind of magic solution. Barbie’s figure shape and her role as a fashion model make this girls think that making a diet would make them feel more self confidence and it is a way of getting control.

While the white girls described an impossible ideal, black teenagers talked about appearance in terms of style, attitude, self-respect and personality. White respondents talked "thin", black ones "shapely". Seventy per cent of the black teenagers said they were satisfied with their weight.

According with Madeleine, Barbie is an encouragement to a destructive behavior among women, and she “symbolizes ‘ageless puberty.’ Anorexia, ‘fixation on appearance and clothes’…” 8

Another polemic around Mattel, the maker of the world's best-selling toy Barbie, is about her manufacture. Barbie is sold in more than 140 countries around the world, even so Barbie is seen as typical American girl but she has never been manufactured in the United States. Instead, Barbie is made by women who look nothing compared like she is. These women work in horrible conditions. “About 11,000 peasant women work at the two Barbie’s factories in China’s Guangdong province…Here wages are not just cheap, they are dirt-cheap. A Los Angeles Times report estimates that just 35 cents (23p) of each Barbie is sold for labour. Barbie’s components are also multi-national. Her hair is from Japan, her colouring from America and the oil that makes up the plastic resins is imported from Taiwan, with most of the oil originating in Saudi Arabia ”9. In Barbie’s world everything is pretty and pink.

Mattel is a veritable fountain of carefully produced, tightly controlled information and news about Barbie. This corporation constantly produces and advertises meanings, narratives, and identities for Barbie like in press releases, commercials, and articles, in Barbie magazines, comic books, and novels, on and inside of the boxes. The end result of this corporate stream of images and information is that Barbie exemplifies contradictions enough to appeal to a wide range of consumers.

So although, negatives Barbie’s influences for children considered for several people, there are equally several fan’s clubs, collectors, places on internet to get information about Barbie, and so on. There are a huge marketing divulgation and representation all over the world. Mattel used Barbie’s role as a fashion model that was expanded to the huge network for adult Barbie collectors, and produces a collector’s range specifically with them in mind. These fans clubs on Internet where people can learn more and find information about specialist’s shops, auditions and toy’s fairs announcements.

Currently on the market are three Barbie CD-ROMS. One lets users help Barbie cook and decorate her Magical House. Also available are Barbie stickers, greeting cards, calendars, watches, backpacks, coloring books and story books for children, wrapping paper, jumbo trading cards, lunch boxes, and clothing for girls. This remarkable proliferation of Barbie products entails a great deal of corporate cooperation, which gets legally sealed through licensing agreements. When Mattel licenses another company to use the Barbie name or image, it maintains control over its brand name; it extends its markets; it garners revenues in the form of royalty fees and it regulates its competition.

In 1994, Mattel launched a collector’s series designed directly at the adult market. The company worked as a partnership with fashion designers including Calvin Klein, Donna Karen, Bill Blass and Ralph Lauren to outfit their dolls at prices ranging up to 80 pounds.

Recent deluxe models were priced as high as 570 pounds. However, over-production in the United States collectors' market has led to 43 pounds 'exclusive' dolls selling in discount stores for 16 pounds.

There are as well two major magazines dedicated to them, Barbie Bazaar and Miller's.

This collecting industry has grown so successful that top sellers produce sales of more than 625,000 pounds a year.

Barbie is considered the world’s most popular doll, which her birthday has always a massive organization behind her. She is a marketing success. For example, for her 30th birthday was organized a massive party renaming Fifth Avenue, Barbie Boulevard in her honour. And for her 40th anniversary, Mattel prepared a star-studded party at the annual Toy Fair, where she was launched in New York.

During all her life, Barbie suffered some physical changes. These changes reflect a good, successful and powerful marketing research. According with Mattel, they said that doing this is not just because of the critics, they simply continuing a well-established pattern of updating its doll to change with the times. Is that possible to conclude that after 45 years of success of her creation, Barbie continuing to confront criticism like the doll should be more reflective of the little girls who play with Barbie and sell her in millions, becoming the world’s best selling toy.

QUOTATIONS

1 M. Rogers, Barbie Culture (London. Thousand Oaks. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1999) p.15

2 ibid

3 M. Rogers, Barbie Culture (London. Thousand Oaks. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1999) p.11

4 Dea Birkett, “Barbie”, Guardian Newspapers Limited [on-line database]

November 28, 1998

(16/03/2004)

5 ibid

6 ibid

7 M. Rogers, Barbie Culture (London. Thousand Oaks. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1999) p.12

8 M. Rogers, Barbie Culture (London. Thousand Oaks. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1999) p.17

9 Ann Treneman, Ann “Barbie Queue”, Guardian Newspapers Limited [on-line database]

November 27, 1996

(16/03/2004)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bardwick, J. Women in Transition. Sussex: The Harvester Press Limited. 1980.
Borbo, S. Unbearable Weight – Feminism, Western Culture, And The Body. Berkeley. Los Angeles. London: University of California Press. 1959.
Crisp, A. Anorexia Nervosa: Let Me Be. London: LEA. 1995.
Davis, K. Reshaping The Female Body – The dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery. New York. London: Routledge. 1995.
Leiss, W., Kline, S., Jhally, S. Social Communication in Advertising: Persons, Products and Images of Well-being. London: Methuen. 1986.
Rogers, M. Barbie Culture. London. Thousand Oaks. New Delhi: SAGE Publications. 1999.
Silverstein, B., Perlick, D. The Cost Of Competence – Why Inequality Causes Depression, Eating Disorders, and Illness in Women. New York. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1995.
Walkerdine, V. School Girl Fictions. New York. London: Verso. 1990.