Barbie: The Exhibition

Barbie is more than just a toy; it’s become an icon that almost every person in the planet recognises. Her universe is ever expansive and continues to grow and evolve just like ours. To mark her 65th birthday, the Design Museum has teamed up with Mattel to organise this exhibition, which includes over two hundred and fifty different objects of the Barbie universe—from Dreamhouses to vehicles, to outfits, dolls, and more. Among them, we can find treasures like a first edition 1959 doll, the first one to be released, as well as other trailblazers like the first Black, Hispanic, and Asian dolls, or the first Barbies with Down syndrome, to use a wheelchair, or to have a fuller, curvier body. 

Of course, fashion plays a major role as well. Besides playing with the doll, most of us also wanted to dress her in the most beautiful, over-the-top looks. Over the past sixty-five years, she’s sported any and every outfit you can imagine: gowns, swimsuits, jeans, or even a formal suit that transformed into an evening dress (Day to Night Barbie, which embodied the way more and more women were entering the corporate world in the 1980s). And she’s amazed kids (and adults) worldwide when wearing dresses in collaboration with designers like Oscar de la Renta and Bob Mackie, or others inspired by Christian Dior, Vivienne Westwood, and more.

But the Barbie universe has been meticulously crafted through every branch of design, from interior and architecture to graphic. And that’s why it’s important for the Design Museum to explore this particular world from a wide lens. In the words of Tim Marlow, CEO and Director of the museum: “Design has been at the heart of Barbie’s story ever since her creation sixty-five years ago. And as we’ve seen recently, her impact has also evolved with each new generation. […] We hope it will be a joyful, fascinating, inspiring, illumating, and even perhaps nostalgic experience for generations of Barbie fans.”