Tales from the wild: everything is Barbie

You, your mom and everyone you know likely heard about the upcoming Barbie movie. Even though we are almost two months away from its opening night in theaters, Barbie is already a phenomenon. Which begs the question: why the hell do I care?

(The following are my opinions and perceptions, so bear with me if not all dates or facts are accurate.)

Feast your eyes on existential despair and bubblegum-pink.

All through the 90s, Mattel had it all. Barbie was a global synonym to “doll”, a phenomenon itself fueled by the calculated specificity of their toy line. Does a kid want to be a ballerina when they grow up? There’s a Barbie for that. Do they enjoy pets? There’s a Barbie for that. Barbie, the character, was as elastic as possible, so she could fit whatever scenario she was put in. Yet, she had to be recognizable and brandable, with her signature Western-European beauty etched on her very plastic skin: slim, caucasian, blue-eyed, blonde. Furthermore, also straight, cisgender, ultra-feminine. Shallow.

Jump to the 2010s, with the slow but sure transition of Millennial kids to Millennial adults, and Mattel had to scramble to keep up. Barbie now had to account for new technologies, new professions, new advances of feminism. (That’s how we got game developer Barbie, not surprisingly still slim, still white, but this time a redhead.) They were facing a consumer audience that started questioning itself and was no longer interested in a one-size-fits-all toy that would teach their kids there is only one standard to aspire to, the same way that they had learned playing Barbie while growing up. And all that culminated in a new generation far more attuned to diversity issues and constant questioning of gender roles: Gen Z.

All of a sudden, Barbie wasn't an appealing toy anymore.

More than a decade before all of this, another toy industry giant, LEGO, realized they were about to lose a generational battle. What Lego did was to rebrand itself as multi-generational, teaming up with equally cross-generational brands like Star Wars, making LEGO Star Wars toys, movies, TV shows. When it comes down to it, there is a Lego for everyone. Now you can give your mom Lego flowers, gift an architecture aficionado with a Lego Taj Mahal or make any kid happy with a box of colorful legos. They are still very much a kid-forward brand but attuned to multiple generations of parents who partake in wildly different values. To sediment their relationship with new generations, the 2014 LEGO Movie came in as a cinematic effort to steer the very basis of their business - the essential Lego building blocks - towards an adult audience, using their language and sense of humor to frame it.

Which is what Mattel is aiming to do with Barbie. This is a movie that is meant to speak to Gen Z-ers fluently, with the same snappy and snarky irony, the same visual coding, addressing the perceived issues with their brand first and foremost. Everything - from the choice of Greta Gerwig, a Gen Z favorite, to direct the movie, to a hardly subtle comeback of the electric pink color to fashion outlets around the world - is part of their great leap to speak to this generation and make them fall in love with barbies again. As with anything in entertainment, getting buy-in from the current generation reaching their adult age is essential to business. And Gen Z is in so many aspects inherently different than all the decades-old brands out there that most businesses, even those driven by the much closer Millennials, are adrift trying to get their attention.

If Barbie works - and let’s face it, it already did - it doesn’t mean doll sales will spike overnight. This is an effort of rebranding, not a sales push. It’s about positioning a product that was once seen as a reflection of its time as a malleable, relatable and, ultimately, cool thing to like. Because referencing Barbie ironically can be cool if everyone understands the irony in it, which is one of the keys to this generation’s embracing previous trends and fads. The dreadful 2000s fashion is back in vogue not just for a natural movement of fashion to resurface codings from previous decades, but because it is dreadful. Tacky, extreme, unflattering in a way that clicks with Gen Z’s questioning of values. So we should expect more Barbies in the near future.

Yet here is the thing; most of these brands and products are out of touch with the values of today. They don’t reflect human diversity, they don’t question social rules established centuries ago, they don’t speak to the newer generations who shape the world. Either they keep up or they die. And to most of them, good riddance. The world will be better without you. (You know I am looking at you, billionaire baby.) But this is a pivotal time to step up and do the work. And if we aim to entertain during this multinational generational scrambling, we need to keep our eyes out and our perception sharp. It’s not essential to like Barbie or her movie, just to try and understand where it’s coming from. So here we are.

-Maíra