Once upon a time, my Grandma gave me my first Barbie doll. I was two years old. I also got a pack of dresses, and a 100 piece accessory set that I was definitely too young for. I don’t remember this historic day, but according to my family, it was love at first sight. As a little kid, I never played with baby dolls- I was just a Barbie girl. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized that I loved Barbie because I loved her clothes. Baby doll clothes weren’t stylish, and even my American Girl doll didn’t have the infinite wardrobe possibilities that my years of playing with Barbie had brought me.
I remember those awkward years when I was around ten years old, when the kids around me started to outgrow Barbie and their other childhood toys. I was still that kid in fifth grade with a Barbie backpack. It was chic: it was blue denim with the Barbie logo embroidered on it. It wasn’t that obnoxious pink Barbie backpack that the kids in the younger grades were carrying.
I retired the Barbie backpack went into middle school the next year, and that was the first time that I felt a lot of pressure to put down my favorite pastime of playing with Barbie. Kids in middle school were all-of-a-sudden so grown up: people were swearing, girls were getting boyfriends, and wearing “cool” clothes… and I felt so NOT COOL. I couldn’t fit into the “cool” clothes that kids were wearing because I was so short, and boys didn’t like me, so there was no chance of getting a boyfriend (this still hasn’t changed lol). BUT, I had two friends who were still secret Barbie lovers, like me. We would still get together and play with our Barbies up until seventh grade, and these were some of my favorite memories. This was also when Barbie released a line called “Fashionistas” (or something like that), and Barbie got a massive glow up. Her clothes were cool, they were trendy: she didn’t dress like the “cool” kids at school, she dressed how I dreamed that I could dress. This was the first time I felt inspired to truly embrace my own style, and stop worrying about fitting in with what everyone else was wearing.
Flash forward to high school: after reading Romeo and Juliet, my English class had a project where we had to dress up in renaissance costumes. I had absolutely nothing in my wardrobe that could pass for renaissance attire and was in a sewing class at the time, so I bartered with my teacher that if I made Renaissance costumes for Barbie and Ken, they could count for my grade. Lucky for me, on the day of the Romeo and Juliet project, all the other kids rolled up to school in their silly costumes, and I showed up with two dolls. My Barbie and Ken had the most historically-accurate costumes of the entire English class: my sewing class also covered fashion history.
The sewing class I took in high school was an elective called “contemporary fashion and design.” I took the class every year of high school, each year got progressively harder and in one of the years, I learned how to design and sew my own sewing patterns. This is a rather finicky process when you’re learning how to do it, and instead of messing up making clothes for myself, I made patterns for Barbie clothes. My Barbies now had couture.
I wish I could say that the role that Barbie played in my education stopped when I graduated high school, but no. For a college writing class, I had to write a persuasive essay about a controversial subject of my choice… and I think you can see where this is going… when it came time to present my paper, I showed up with Barbie doll as a prop and several pages written about her value for young girls, where I debunked every argument that Barbie had a negative impact on self-esteem.
The next year, I started ballroom dancing, and my Grandma (the same grandma who bought me my very first Barbie 18 years before) bought me Dancing with the Stars Barbie as a birthday present. At this point, I fully accepted that Barbie was going to be a part of my life forever. I used Barbie as part of my apartment decor when I got my first apartment and was too broke to buy real decorations, and I still pull out Christmas Barbie as part of my decor at the holidays.
When I was 25, I was the Maid of Honor in my best friends’ wedding. We had been friends since high school. My best friend had seen my apartments over the years, and at one point, the Barbie decor sparked a conversation where she told me that she had also been one of those kids secretly playing with Barbie well into the middle school years. For her bachelorette party, my gift to her was wedding Barbie and wedding Ken. I included a note that she should keep them for her future kids, as a piece of fashion history from the year she got married (one of my Aunts had a wedding Barbie from when she got married, and I loved playing with it when I spent time at her house growing up).
I’ll never forget the moment when she opened the Barbie dolls: it was muggy summer afternoon in Ohio, and we were opening gifts on the private patio of a brunch spot in Columbus, and my gift was last. My best friend and I had bonded over a love of fashion, and she had several friends who, like me, were in the fashion industry. There was an intimate crowd of about twelve stylish girls sitting around while my bestie tore the wrapping paper off of Barbie dolls (a bit unorthodox considering she had opened lingerie a few gifts previous), and there was instant, collective excitement. Everyone was sharing their memories of Barbie, and my friend and I admitted to the group that we both played with our dolls until middle school. So many other girls chimed in that they did too! I was shocked, it seemed to be a trend among our fashion-savvy friends that Barbie was a large part of their lives too.
They say that when figuring out what you’re passionate about, look back to your childhood interests. Barbie and her fabulous wardrobe have never stopped inspiring me, and it brings me joy to share my love of fashion with all of you through this little blog!
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xoxo,
Kaitlyn
