As a 42-year-old man, I may not represent this exhibition’s target audience. But last year’s saturnalian battle-of-the-sexes Barbie movie – directed by Greta Gerwig, and starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling – was so brilliant that I arrived expectantly at London’s Design Museum. Bring on the pink!
Sadly, Barbie®: The Exhibition – while stylishly staged by Sam Jacob Studio, with a flurry of inventive touches – lacks the bite or wit of Gerwig’s film, which mocked its subject and Mattel, the multinational behind the franchise that co-produced it. Too often, the show’s toothless interpretation reads like smug corporate hogwash. Anything potentially troublesome for this 65-year-old brand is suppressed.
By the end, when, for the umpteenth time, I was being whacked over the head with the marketing mallet, hammering home yet another on-brand message about Barbie being a “role model for all”, I was rolling my eyes. As for the suggestion that Mattel – a chronic producer of planet-choking plastic – is, in fact, virtuously mindful of environmental issues: that had me laughing out loud.
At least, in Gerwig’s movie, Mattel’s ludicrously leggy creation – who, for generations of brainwashed girls, embodied a dinky yet anatomically impossible ideal, with perennially arched feet – is called a “fascist” to her made-up face. Here, Barbie is simply an “icon” – no ifs or buts. I looked in vain inside the gift shop for a pink sick bucket among the merch.
It’s a shame, because, aside from the incessant promotion (a black-and-white television advertisement is even screened at the start), there’s stuff to enjoy. The exhibition opens with the original Barbie doll, from 1959: an immediately recognisable, predictably buxom glamour puss in a stripy monochrome swimsuit, coquettishly glancing sideways while clutching a pair of slinky white-framed shades. (The association with bright pink came later, with the release of Superstar Barbie in 1977.) No wonder America’s girls – hitherto forced to make do with boring dollies resembling babies – lapped her up.
