Tag: 1965
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Whitman Coloring Books (1962-1965)
Whitman’s coloring books are the Midge to their own paper dolls’ Barbie: a little less popular, a little less pretty, but still they hold a special place in our hearts. You can recognize the cover art, above, from paper dolls, fashion booklets and other media; the interior pages, however, are almost totally unique. One thing…
sheathsensation
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The Many Abodes of Barbie, Part III: 1965
Barbie & Skipper Deluxe House Another year, another dream house… and this one’s deluxe! But was it? Unlike earlier houses, Sears’ exclusive 1965 Deluxe House for Barbie and Skipper was mostly plastic, which probably was deluxe in 1965, its furniture molded in place. However, compared to last year’s New Dream House, Barbie’s square footage had…
sheathsensation
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Early furniture: Mattel Modern and Susy Goose
Mattel Modern (1958) In 1958, Mattel debuted its Mattel Modern line of stylish, wooden doll furniture, and a year later Barbie was introduced to make use of it. Wait, what? Okay, that’s not quite how it happened. Mattel Modern, a line of sleek, midcentury-styled, real wood furniture, was released before Barbie, but it was meant…
sheathsensation
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Doll Carrying Cases (1961-1972)
The Barbie carrying cases of the mod and vintage years certainly packed a lot of style. From the earliest examples, with limited palettes used to depict Barbie posed before jazzy, off-kilter colored quadrilaterals, her poses mirroring those found in the early fashion booklets, into the full-color phase, with floating heads and sparkle trails, during which…
sheathsensation
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Deluxe Reading Dream Kitchen (1963)
Barbie’s earliest abodes may suggest that she was not much of a cook: neither the ’62 Dream House nor her ’64 Campus dorm room provided kitchen facilities (predictably, in the latter case); the Go-Together rooms offered a dining room, but no kitchen; and the ’64 New Dream House had a very minimal kitchen in the…
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Sew-Free Fashion-Fun Kits (1965-1966)
In the realm of vintage Barbie illustrations, the Sew-Free Fashion-Fun kits are a category all their own. The loose, markered style, supplemented with certain precise details like fabric patterns and fingered gloves, as above, lends the drawings drama, romance, and, of course, glamour. Were the fashions themselves elegant and appealing? We shall see. The illustrations…
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A chronicle of Barbie shoes, 1959-1967
Recently, while sourcing various, specific vintage shoes for a custom project, I began to realize there were basic facts about Barbie’s early shoes that were not known to me. What year was Barbie’s first pair of closed-toe shoes produced? (The answer surprised me, but maybe you already know.) What were the most common “gold” open-toed…
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Whitman paper dolls (1962-1965)
One of the deepest wells of vintage Barbie fashion sketches must be Whitman paper dolls–if you agree that they have a place alongside all the art that came straight from Mattel. Whitman had paper dolls on many subjects, from Kim Novak to Marlo Thomas to Twiggy and far beyond, and it’s perfectly possible that the…
sheathsensation
Silken Flame 