It seemed that the world was going to end and we only changed numbers, but perhaps the world as we knew it ended, 2000 brought many changes and, as a true reflection of that like is the world of toys the Bratz were born ...
... and Bratz changed the rules of a game from which the toy industry has not yet recovered because the trend they set is still seen today in dolls like Monster High or LOL. Diverse dolls with large heads, bodies smaller in proportion, huge eyes ... just the opposite of what it had been to date, everything was beginning to be further from the real human being and closer to the world of "cartoons" . Perhaps a premonition that the further away from reality the better in a time of crisis, wars and pandemics?
Bratz were designed by Carter Bryant and he sold his idea to MGA. The problem was, Bryant was working for Mattel at the time, and apparently his contract stated that what he designed while working for Mattel was owned by Mattel, so they went to trial and years and years of litigation followed. As if that weren't enough, artist Butch Belair sued the two companies when Carter Bryant testified that he was inspired by Belair's successful 2000 campaign for Steve Madden, who made runway trends affordable for American teenage girls of the time, where some retouched models with disproportionate heads and feet were the starrs.
Meanwhile Mattel launched its Bratz-type dolls called My Scene, more like a big-headed and a cartoonish version of Barbie with big shoes that weren't enough to beat Bratz so they launched another line of Hip Hop-inspired dolls, Flavas, but it only made things worse and offended the community that found them too stereotyped.
In these 20 years of the millennium, and after all these comings and goings of litigation, rulings and appeals, Bratz have been present intermittently until 2018 and each time addressing a public more collector and adult as we see in those Bratz designed by the illustrator Hayden Williams. Perhaps because times change and the children of that time who were marked by these dolls are now adults and they connect them with that childhood, as happened previously with other toys and as it will probably continue to happen because Bratz definitely are compass of their time.