Barbie Adds Curvy and Tall to Body Shapes
By RACHEL ABRAMS

When it comes to Barbie’s body, it will no longer be one size fits all.

On Thursday, Mattel unveiled curvy, petite and tall versions of its iconic fashion doll whose unrealistically thin shape has attracted criticism for decades. The three body types will also be sold in an assortment of skin tones, eye colors and hairstyles.

The move is about more than just making Barbie look different. While Barbie was once Mattel’s powerhouse brand, sales have plummeted in recent years as the doll has struggled to remain relevant to little girls who do not look like her and who play with toys other than dolls.

“This is about drawing a wider demographic that had turned away from Barbie back to Barbie,” said Jim Silver, the editor of TTPM, a toy review website.

Barbie’s latest makeover began in a big way last year, when Mattel released a broad assortment of dolls in a greater number of skin tones, eye colors and even facial structures as part of its Fashionistas line.

“I think today, frankly more so than any other time, Barbie is truly representing what girls see,” said Richard Dickson, who is Mattel’s president and chief operating officer and the executive in charge of Barbie’s reinvention.

But some industry experts and academics have long doubted that cosmetic changes — whether racial or ethnic or body shapes — can revive the popularity of the 57-year-old Barbie, whose sales have been declining by double-digits in recent years.

Executives like Mr. Dickson have been optimistic, pointing to signs that Barbie’s in-store sales began picking up last year. Still, third-quarter sales in 2015 — the most recent figures available — showed that Barbie sales declined 14 percent from the same period a year earlier.

The slumping sales may also be partly attributed to the shift away from traditional toys toward electronics and games in recent years, as many parents and children have clamored for less gender-specific toys. Companies like GoldieBlox have sprung up to offer girls more career-oriented toys, and even Lego, the world’s top toymaker, has had to alter its strategy and some of its building block lines to accommodate the growth in the market for learning toys that appeal to boys and girls.

Mr. Dickson has been steering Mattel’s marketing campaign to focus more on Barbie’s career ambitions than her body image. A new “Imagine the Possibilities” ad, for example, features little girls picturing themselves as teachers, coaches, and other professionals.

Barbie’s aspirations have translated to Mattel’s products: Hello Barbie, the interactive talking doll, asks children about what they want to be when they grow up — a far cry from the Barbie who once claimed that “Math class is tough.”

“The ones in multiple skin tones did phenomenal for Mattel, and it showed them that people wanted much more than the blonde blue-eyed Barbie,” Mr. Silver said. (Mattel unveiled an African-American Barbie in the late 1960s, and the first Asian Barbie appeared in 1980 as part of its “dolls of the world” collection.)

Still, Mattel executives have struggled to rebrand Barbie as an aspirational figure, one not so closely identified with her unnatural body measurements.

“It’s hardly a bolt of genius to say let’s make dolls that look different,” said Sean McGowan, an analyst with Oppenheimer and Company. “It’s more like saying ‘Yeah, we stuck with that one single iconic image for too long, let’s try multiple ones.’ ”

The new set of dolls was reported earlier by Time magazine on Thursday and is available for pre-order online. The dolls are expected to hit store shelves at major retailers, including Walmart and Toys “R” Us, in March, according to a Mattel spokesman, Alex Clark.

On Twitter, reactions were mixed.

“I think as a woman it’s about time, and as a physician, I strongly support that,” said Dr. Kelli Harding, assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, who has a background in body dysmorphic disorder. “For a little girl, it’s important to have diversity in what they’re playing with.”

Mattel is remaining tight-lipped about how it came up with Barbie’s new proportions. It’s part of the “art and the science,” as Mr. Dickson put it, of creating any toy.

But a curvy, or more full-figured, Barbie doll is about more than just reshaping one brand. The initiative is part of a broader cultural shift at Mattel, where executives have been trying to transform the company into a 21st century toymaker.

Faced with weakening sales in its core brands like Barbie and Fisher-Price, and criticism that it was too slow to pick up on trends, Mattel has undertaken a number of efforts to improve innovation.

A little over a year ago, it created its Toy Box division to fast-track new products, like Hello Barbie and the virtual reality View-Master, two products Mattel has used to showcase that it can be as tech-savvy as its competitors.

Barbie’s new shapes also coincide with a progressive cultural shift already underway in stores and the toy aisles. Parents and many health experts have complained that too many dolls, models and even clothing companies conform to an extremely thin, even anorexic, body type and have pressured corporations to offer a broader variety of images and apparel sizes to give girls and boys more confidence in their own body shapes.

And some parents, concerned about negative gender stereotypes (a racecar for a son, a princess doll for a daughter), have pushed retailers into more gender-neutral territory.

The Disney Store, for example, decided to label all of its children’s Halloween costumes as “for kids,” as opposed to for boys or girls. Amazon, which by some measures accounts for more than half of all online sales, has banished gender distinctions for its toys.

Last year, for probably the first time in Mattel’s history, a Moschino Barbie commercial featured a boy playing with the doll.

“I think that this is bigger than Barbie’s shape, because this really gets at gender inequality in the United States as well,” Dr. Harding said.

不再專寵過瘦芭比！芭比大變身 高矮胖來比美

向來瘦得不切實際的芭比娃娃，現在順應潮流推出三種不同造型：高佻、嬌小和豐滿身材。

芭比娃娃問世以來，一直維持完美身材，可是，製造這種最暢銷洋娃娃的美泰兒公司（Mattel）28日宣布上述消息，結束長久以來的傳統。

未來將有4種體型、7種膚色、22種瞳孔、24種髮型

芭比1959年3月9日上市，即將滿57歲。新造型娃娃加入後，芭比系列將有四種不同體態，且共有七種不同膚色、22種不同眼睛顏色和24種髮型，反映不同身材和型態的女性。

美泰兒總裁兼執行長狄克森說：「芭比反映女孩子眼中的世界。她隨著時間演進和成長，同時仍堅守原有精神的能力，正是芭比一直是全世界首要時尚洋娃娃的根本因素。」

芭比並非第一種粉碎美女刻板模式的洋娃娃。大尺碼身材的Emme娃娃2002年就出現，2014年底問世的Lammily則號稱擁有標準的人體比率。

美泰兒多年來一再為芭比換新面貌，不過改變其體態還是破天荒之舉。美泰兒長久堅守芭比原有體態，早就受到批評。

英國2006年一項調查發現，接觸過芭比的5到8歲女童對自己身材的滿意度較低。

美泰兒高層主管曾表示，「芭比的身材從來就無意反映現實。它的設計是為了讓女孩子容易幫它換衣服」。

美泰兒表示，新體型芭比娃娃可在該公司網站預購，2月出貨，3月開始在美國實體商店上架，然後再舖貨到世界其他國家。傳統的芭比仍將繼續銷售。

芭比娃娃是20世紀最廣為人知及最暢銷的玩偶，由Ruth Handler設計。芭比娃娃在超過150個國家行銷，並已售出超過10億個。

1959年原版芭比推出時的售價3美元，2004年10月原版芭比在eBay拍賣價已高達美金3552.5美元，2006年9月26日更在倫敦佳士得的拍賣會賣到9000英鎊。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/29/business/barbie-now-in-more-shapes.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytstyle.com/culture/20160203/t03barbie/zh-hant/

Video：Barbie Dolls Get a Makeover A chief executive of a toy review site discusses Mattel's new Barbie doll, available in curvy, petite and tall versions in an assortment of skin tones, eye colors and hairstyles.
http://nyti.ms/1nSgKJS

2016-01-29．聯合晚報．A5．焦點．國際新聞組