Names

Fashionistas are inclusive, and it's so great but the fact they have a number by "name" with a brief model description (#67CactusCutie) has, in my opinion, an appalling human message: "we are a 'number' in a more or less beautiful outfit". We must remember that historically humans have been numbered to remove all the humanity and the uniqueness of the individual.

The name makes us unique and Ruth Handler gave her doll one very dear to her, the name of her daughter Barbie and logically Ken took after her son. But this didn't go smooth to the intelligent and sensitive Ken who always resented the impact of the doll on him. Stacey was named after one of Ken's daughters. "The Body Burden: Living in the shadow of Barbie" is the book she wrote about her fight with obesity and eating disorders.

Of course to name your creations after your dear ones is well intentioned and the impact could not be foreseen nor the tremendous success of Barbie but that kind of problems usually root deeper to blame the doll as the only cause.

Barbara Roberts and Ken Carson point us in the direction of Carson and Roberts the advertising agency who made mattel win lots of money. Then Barbara Handler married Allan Segal, so Ken's friend was Allan. Casuality or not Allan was discontinued when they divorced to reapear in 90s. The doll Baby Cheryl was named after the first daughter of the real Barbie and Todd was named after her son.

Other sources for names were on TV like Francie, pressumably inspired by Sally Field's Gidget whose dad called her "Francie" or they could be nicknames as Ruth Handler says in Dream Doll: "Incidentally, we gave Skipper (and her soon-to-be-introduced friend Skooter) their names because cute nicknames were in vogue in the mid-1960s"

...like the first celebrity barbie doll who was known as Twiggy (stick), names make us unique and, while many children give other names to their dolls during the game, when the dolls return to the shelf are Barbie or Ken with a direct link to them and for this reason, sometimes, the names of the dolls changed, adapting them to a certain country to attract children better, such as Miko and Whitney, who were Marina and Laura in Spain at a time when those names were fashionable and we all knew a Marina or a Laura in our class or in other groups.

So Barbie stopped to be "it" and became a "she".