Barbie was born on March 9, 1959 and, already in August 1963, she was
the most popular doll in the city
, as the advertisements said for a toy that barely cost three dollars (note, about 30 at the current exchange rate after inflation).
In 1965, Barbie had already gone to the moon.
In the mid-seventies, she already had a camper, was a surgeon and participated in the Olympic Games.
In the eighties she had been styled by Vidal Sassoon and painted by Warhol, she was Hispanic, she was black (not her friends, she), she flew airplanes, she was an astronaut and she appeared on MTV.
In the nineties she played soccer, she dressed as Bob Mackie and she had already won the presidency several times.
In the 2000s, her formal clothes were from Versace and her tracksuits were from Juicy Couture, she did modeling shows and starred in more than 30 films.
In the 2010s she exceeded two million followers on social networks, she had three different bodies for the first time and dressed not as her, but as Karl Lagerfeld.
And in this decade, when she has been Elizabeth II, she has had vitiligo, Down syndrome and a wheelchair, and she has become TikTok, Barbie turns 65.
Welcome to retirement age.
Does the meteoric career of the most famous doll in the world end here?
Now here near.
She still has a lot of skin to get into.
And to its creators, many worlds to imagine for her, especially now when the film of the same name has given her a huge boost.
In the offices where she was born and has grown up these 65 years, Barbie is still the queen.
Mattel's offices are located in the small Californian city of El Segundo (17,000 inhabitants), located within Los Angeles County.
It is a quiet town, with a refinery that Chevron installed in 1911 and from which the city takes its name - it is the company's second oil processing center, after another near San Francisco -, a Boeing facility (the main employer of the neighbors) and offices of the Los Angeles Lakers and the
Los Angeles Times
newspaper .
Beyond, tree-lined streets where, from time to time, you pass an all-pink van with a huge Barbie poster.
“To Barbieland this way,” says the little bus, breaking the line of trucks and Teslas that cross the quiet streets of the town, without a soul walking through it.
The bus transports employees and visitors to the headquarters of Mattel, the doll's parent company.
No, it is not the same headquarters, inside or out, that is seen in the film.
It is much larger and somewhat less gray.
There is a tower similar to the one seen in Greta Gerwig's film - but not the same one, which in the film is filmed in the headquarters of a bank in the financial center of Los Angeles - and there are also low buildings where the team works. of design that creates the dolls and their universe.
More information
The triumph of pink: how the premiere of 'Barbie' has managed to be the cultural and commercial phenomenon of the year
Some of the drawers from Barbie's closet, with the clothes used to make her outfits, at the Mattel offices in El Segundo, California, in 2024.Mattel Inc.
Mattel has 32,000 employees around the world, but these offices are primarily home to the core, management, administrative and design teams.
This is where Barbies are thought up, where they are created, designed and sketched.
Where dolls come to life.
In the offices they do not usually allow visitors, not even for the press;
This time, and on the occasion of the 65th anniversary, they have organized a tour to learn about its operation limited to a dozen media outlets and
influencers
from around the world, to which EL PAÍS has had access.
The route—in which there are Barbies everywhere, even in the bathroom—is guided by its workers, and there are areas with
Top secret
signs or that do not allow entry, but in general access is wide and questions are allowed. the employees.
On the right, the original 1959 Barbie doll and, on the left, her sculpture, displayed at the Mattel offices in El Segundo, California.MP
As the teams say, the work here is very specialized.
As if it were a person, there are experts (let's talk about experts; they are the majority) who create first versions of the doll in 3D;
who make up their faces by hand;
who decide what their hair should be and then sew it by hand on traditional machines;
There are those who even make the boxes where it will be placed, presented and sold.
But that does not mean that everyone can contribute ideas for the birth of a new creature, whether it is one more in one of the lines, with small variations, or a total revolution.
The biggest in a doll that has been the subject of criticism for decades for being a blonde of impossible measurements came in 2016, when the company incorporated three more realistic bodies: a taller doll, a shorter one and a fatter one (or, perhaps, less thin, simply).
Even Time
magazine
featured it on its cover under the ironic headline: “And now, can we stop talking about my body?”
One of the architects of this change is Kim Culmone, vice president and head of doll design for more than a decade: “Barbie is today the most diverse doll in the world,” she states with complete confidence.
“When you look around you, there are many types of people.
There is no lack of inspiration.
And you continue introducing dolls to the market that did not exist in that line, or perhaps did not even exist on the market.
But the reason you do it is because when a child sees himself in a toy, he feels validated,” she opines.
The design team is made up of just 15 people, who are the ones who usually start the ideas, but then join each creative leg (hairdressing, clothing, networks...) to give them life, led by Culmone.
Kittaya Wongchinda, a sculptor at Mattel, shows the 3D program used to sculpt new Barbies, at the El Segundo, California, offices in 2024.Mattel Inc.
That is why for her, like for so many others, that January 2016 in which they announced three new bodies was a turning point, probably the most important in the history of the company until the devastating arrival of the film in the summer of 2023. After With him, other changes came, with a greater variety of races, bodies, hairstyles or physical features, also due to some illness or accident.
This variety is also seen in the tour of the offices.
A machine for making 3D sketches is installed in one of the rooms.
Before they were made in clay, the originals that remain locked in display cases (also the bronze sculpture of a first doll), but now technology makes everything easier... or more complicated, because managing the 3D panel with a stylus , is not easy.
Sculptor Kittaya Wongchinda misses the days of clay, but she recognizes that this system helps her be more agile.
She has created faces, for example, like that of a recent Claudia Schiffer Barbie.
Sasha Stoyan Lopez, in charge of the dolls' faces, paints a Barbie head.Mattel Inc.
Sasha Stoyan Lopez is in charge of painting the dolls' faces, who decides what the eyebrows and eyelashes are like (the doll has had them since 1970) or how much Barbie smiles.
Equipped with special glasses, she is able to sketch a complete face on that little plastic ball that is a head in just five minutes, although, she smiles, she acknowledges, it usually takes her much longer.
After the design, each Barbie of the millions of units sold (Mattel does not provide specific data) is assembled in different factories around the world, but there is one step that is done in El Segundo: that of putting the hair of each and every one of the dolls.
There is a small room with lots of spools of colored threads—mostly yellow and brown, but also pink, green or purple—of different thicknesses: that's Barbie's hair.
These threads are manipulated until the desired shape, thickness and hairstyle is achieved, by hand and by machine, to find what the design team is looking for.
Heide Waldorf, responsible for Barbie's hair and face, with several coils with which the doll's hair is created.Mattel Inc.
It is also striking to see how something is thought about that the end customer does not usually think about: boxes.
Suzanna Lakatos is the packaging
design director
and the one who thinks about how the doll should look: posture, photography, color and shape of the package.
For the Barbie created for this anniversary, she devised more than twenty boxes with different backgrounds (better Barbie pink or sapphire blue, the color of 65th anniversaries? Pink, always), tones, graphic designs, phrases and positions of the doll.
Aesthetics are important, but she goes further: “There is a physical component: the pose.
And the challenge is one, not to fall.
There are limits,” laughs Lakatos.
She knows that her work is especially valued by collectors, who appreciate the packaging and never take their doll out of it, because if they do, it loses value.
Suzanna Lakatos, the director of packaging design, shows the box of the 65th anniversary doll along with several options being considered, at the Mattel workshops in El Segundo, California. Mattel Inc.
“There is a whole team saying: what more can we do?
How do we do it better?
How can we leave the mark better than we found it?
I tell my team: if you could do anything you wanted with Barbie, without rules, what would you do?” says Culmone, for whom the challenge is to remain leaders and relevant.
“Most toys last between three and five years, and you have to be very successful to go from being three to five years old to 65. As a brand, the only way to do that is by constantly evolving, and making sure you have resonance and that you connect with the current generation of kids, fans and parents.
“We were seeing that we did not have the resonance of the past and we had to change.”
One of Mattel's workers sews the hair of a Barbie doll on one of its machines in El Segundo, California.Mattel Inc.
Mattel executive vice president Lisa McKnight agrees with that need for connection that Culmone talks about.
“The average toy cycle is five years... and the fact is that we have surpassed three generations.
It's incredible to have come this far, this timelessness.
And our purpose is to place this woman in a position of power and for her to be a representative throughout the world,” she says.
“And we are more aware than ever that everyone is welcome here.”
The set of Barbie's house where the videos for BarbieStyle, the doll's Instagram channel, are recorded.Mattel Inc.
That welcome that McKnight conveys to everyone seems more and more real in recent years, when Barbie has become a global phenomenon thanks, above all, to social networks.
In addition to a classic profile on Instagram (3.5 million followers) and TikTok (two million), they have had the BarbieStyle Instagram (2.8 million) for 10 years, where they play with Barbie, place her in scenarios, take her to the Grammys or make her live scenes of everyday life.
Everything is as fake as the doll itself, obviously, but everything is as authentic as it can be: if she goes to the Grammys, she goes to the Grammys.
In these offices, these contents are photographed and recorded;
On the day of the visit, the crew was messing around on a set with a huge house for Barbie (not like the ones in toy stores, but four or five times bigger) to film how she baked a birthday cake.
There was a mixer, a carton of milk, strawberries and even Barbie-sized eggs.
Zlatan Kusnoor, creative responsible for the toy's network accounts, explains that everything is so real that, if Barbie travels to Canada, as she was going to do these weeks, they take her to Canada with a suitcase full of clothes and accessories, and with a team.
“We would never falsify it, everything has to be completely authentic,” he says.
“We have been making real objects for 10 years, we create them to measure.”
Zlatan Kusnoor, Barbie's social media manager, and Rachel Ritter, the doll's stylist, in the room that is Barbie's closet, in El Segundo, California, in 2024. Mattel Inc.
To prepare all those
looks
, Barbie has a stylist, Rachel Ritter.
Her work office is every
Barbiefan
's dream .
She has closets and drawers full of objects: specifically dedicated to sandals, belts, fur coats, party dresses... She has access to archive wardrobes (precisely the clothes the doll wore to the Grammys), but also to what the design team does on a day-to-day basis and even to pieces that are custom-made after being inspired by magazines (there are clippings on their board), networks, trends and catwalks.
“You can still enjoy Barbie even if you're an adult,” Ritter smiles.
An original painting by Andy Warhol featuring a portrait of the Barbie doll hangs in the Mattel offices in El Segundo, California.MP
“The more diverse the dolls, the richer the narrative,” Culmone says.
“And it can happen in the movie or with the children playing with Barbie.
That is why it is important to diversify the collection, because the narrative becomes more dynamic, real and rich.”
That is to say, appearing on TikTok and walking the red carpets of the world shows that, at 65 years old, Barbie is far from retiring, even if she could.
With more than 1 billion dolls sold to date, she even has an original Andy Warhol with her face in the hallway next to the elevator.
The time has not come for her goodbye.
She still has many hours of play ahead of her.