Tag: vintage barbie
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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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Barbie’s Fashion Shop (1963)
What is it that makes a doll boutique so desirable? I always wanted one as a child. Did my young mind subconsciously believe that the shop would refill with new designs as Barbie “purchased” them? Is it an aspiration to consumption, and a desire to incorporate the act into make-believe? Or would it simply render…
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The Many Abodes of Barbie, Part II: 1964
The New Dream House In 1964 Barbie’s style of living got a major upgrade in the form of a new house, rich with detail, packed with almost too much furniture, and separated into four living spaces: living room, bedroom, kitchen and patio. The new home was furnished with a sofa, two armchairs, an end table,…
sheathsensation
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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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When Barbie turned 21
It’s a paradox: she was a teen-age fashion model in 1959, and she turned 21 in 1980. For Barbie, both are true. And in 1980 Barbie held her 21st birthday bash, where else? in a nightclub: “Hurrah” in Manhattan, a “new wave disco,” per the Charlotte Observer. Befittingly, the party was punctuated by a fashion…
sheathsensation
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Barbie and Ken Little Theatre (1964)
The built environment of Barbie got a unique entry in 1964: a repertory theatre where Ken and Barbie starred in all the plays. In addition to the play set, seven costume ensembles were sold separately in 1964, with all but one carried over into ’65; the image above shows part of the packaging for a…
sheathsensation
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Sidebar: Barbie Sings! (1961)
I stumbled across an interesting eBay listing over the weekend: a set of 45 rpm records from 1961, “sung” by Barbie and Ken (the back cover identifies the real singers as “lovely Charlotte Austin” and “handsome young Bill Cunningham”). The record jacket and lyrics pages are illustrated and make for a nice mini-update. Jodi Benson,…
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Whitman paper dolls (1967-1973)
During Barbie’s mod years, the Whitman illustrators experimented with a diversity of art styles, demonstrated in the collage of Barbie paper dolls above. (If a couple of them look like Stacey to you, let me reassure you that Whitman identified all as Barbie herself–we’ll see Stacey in a moment.) Starting with the “Barbie has a…
sheathsensation
Silken Flame 