Author: M.G. Lord
Quotes of Author: M.G. Lord
In Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, Stephen Bayley tells us that "nothing is as crass and vulgar as instant classification according to hairstyle, clothing and footwear, yet it is . . . a cruelly accurate analytical form." Because Barbie is a construct of class-as well as a construct of gender- this crass, vulgar, and accurate investigation cannot be avoided. "When it comes to the meaning of things, there are no more powerful transmitters than clothes, those quasi-functional devices which, like an inverted fig, put the heart of the matter in front of the skin," Bayley writes. Yet powerful though the transmissions may be, many Americans deliberately ignore them. book-quoteOne factor was the Barbie group at Ogilvy & Mather, the ad agency that had, in the seventies, acquired Carson/Roberts. By 1984-a year after Sally Ride's landmark space flight, the same year as Geraldine Ferraro's historic bid for the U.S. vice presidency-Mattel urged O&M creative director Elaine Haller and writer Barbara Lui to, in Lui's words, "express where women were and where they wanted their daughters to be at the time." Upon hearing that, Lui told me last year, she remembered her own childhood on Manhattan's Upper West Side. "My mother's words came to me," she said. "My name is Barbara-I was called Bobbie at home-and my mother used to say, 'Bobbie, you can do anything,' " which, with a few revisions, became the doll's new slogan: "We girls can do anything, right, Barbie? book-quote
