Barbie is 65 years old this year – confusing perhaps, for anyone who thought that celebrations had peaked a year ago with the release of Greta Gerwig’s 2023 film. That, it turns out, was a mere prelude, a garland among many bestowed on Barbie, who was last year named among Forbes magazine’s list of “The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women”.

As her longevity proves, Barbie is serious business, and manufacturer Mattel reported that the blockbuster film boosted sales by 9 per cent to $1.9bn during the first quarter following its release. As to whether Barbie cuts it as a serious design icon worthy of a one-woman show at the Design Museum – I admit I was sceptical. Though popular, money-spinning exhibitions have never been more essential to our cash-strapped museums, there are limits, and all that pink plastic just seems so, well, basic.

I was wrong. This exhibition is pure joy, a nostalgic reminder of the magic these little dolls have brought to generations of children, but also a highly informative, neatly and passionately conveyed argument for why they matter now – to children, to adults, to anyone with an imagination and a fondness for nice little things. “Toys and games” said designer Charles Eames in 1961, “are the preludes to serious ideas”, an insight that risks being forgotten today as children are pressed towards “educational” activities, school holidays are considered too long, and boredom is a curse to be avoided not embraced.

The exhibition of 180 dolls opens with Number 1 Barbie, rotating majestically on a glass-covered pedestal. Issued in 1959, her ludicrously retroussé nose, round cheeks and demure expression are a long way from today’s incarnation, and though her blonde hair and screen siren body tick the familiar boxes, her chic black and white swimwear admits not a hint of pink.

From here, curator Danielle Thom launches straight into Barbie’s history, in a small but well set-out gallery emphasising not only the cutting-edge manufacturing techniques used in the dolls’ design and production, but Barbie’s importance as a cultural and social phenomenon, and perhaps even as a feminist hero. Number 1 Barbie was inspired by 1950s glamourpusses like Dovima and Dorian Leigh, but marketed as a “Teen Age Fashion Model”, nonetheless, for whom girls could imagine and orchestrate grown up lives. 

Barbie was created by Ruth Handler, the co-founder of Mattel, in 1945, and its first president at a time when playing with dolls usually meant pretending to be a mother looking after babies. But Handler knew from her own daughter’s love of paper dolls that “little girls just want to be bigger girls”, and she set about creating a less restrictive, more ambitious role model. 

As the 2023 film reinforced so brutally, Ken was little more than a diversion for Barbie, who by the early 1960s not only had an extensive, couture-inspired wardrobe, but a Dreamhouse, and what was quite pointedly marketed as “Barbie’s Own Sportscar” – a British-designed Austin-Healey 3000, no less. If today, a Dreamhouse is tinged with Stepford Wives overtones, in 1962 its open-plan minimal design, done out in the sunny colours of the day, was all about female independence, at a time when a single woman could not expect to take out a mortgage without the assistance of a male guarantor. Above all, the original Dreamhouse was about socialising, relaxing, listening to records: Barbie was not the kind of woman who needed a kitchen. Despite channelling relaxed Malibu surfer girl vibes in the 1970s, she had made her mark as a “career girl” by 1964, and was promoted to a power player in 1985, with her own office, computer and mobile phone, and a “Day-to-Night” wardrobe that transferred effortlessly from office to wine bar.

Today, all of this seems admirably progressive, a million miles away from the commonly held view of Barbie as the trashy alter ego of generations of pink-obsessed airheads beset with body image problems. In fact, though Barbieworld became pinker in the 1980s, it was not until the turn of the new millennium that it became her defining colour.

Barbie was unsettling parents long before she turned flamingo-coloured, and like many, I suspect, my first doll of this sort was not Barbie, but her supposedly more wholesome and definitely more boring British counterpart, Sindy. Barbie, by contrast, had a sublime allure, unforgettable even now. In December 1985, Peaches ‘N Cream Barbie was a prospect as delicious as her name implied. My best friend Joanne had a crumpled picture of her pulled from a brochure, the frothy puffs of peach tuile accruing glamour as we pored over her at playtime. Magic occurred: Joanne got Peaches ‘N Cream for Christmas, and dutifully we all went round to worship at her tiny little feet. The pearlescent, textured bodice was even better in real life, the diamond earrings and necklace sealing the deal on an impossible glamour that was now suddenly, inexplicably ours.

With emotional baggage like this, it was with some trepidation that I searched through doll after lovely doll, each exquisitely displayed in designer Sam Jacob Studio’s fashion boutique-toyshop of dreams mashup, to eventually locate Peaches ‘N Cream, surrounded by several other equally opulent 1980s colleagues. Fears that I might now see mass-produced plastic where once I saw goddess-like perfection were safely allayed. Nearly 40 years later, she’s still got it.

As a doll who paid homage both to Princess Diana and Joan Collins in Dynasty, Peaches ‘N Cream did, however improbably, reflect the changing aspirations and mores of the 1980s. Barbie has been criticised for promoting unrealistic, idealised body types, but though it took until 2016 for Mattel to launch a new “curvy” body shape, the first Barbie to use a wheelchair was issued back in 1997.

Now, Barbie is, says Mattel, “the world’s most diverse doll brand”, and is available with myriad body shapes, disabilities, skin tones, hair colours and textures. In fact, though Barbie spent her first 20 years as a skinny white woman, the first Black Barbie hit the shelves in 1980, along with Hispanic and “Oriental” dolls, designed by Mattel’s first Black female chief designer, Kitty Black Perkins.

A lampshade made of Barbie hair notwithstanding, the exhibition’s highpoint is a chronological display featuring the American Girl of 1965, Barbie’s Carnaby Street-inspired English friend Stacey from 1968, and a Farrah Fawcett-alike from 1977, right up to a “Curvy” Fashionista from 2019. It’s a fashion show in miniature, but you see the head and body designs evolving too, in line with standards and expectations in wider society.

Barbie’s attitude to female empowerment is just as enlightened: today’s on-message “You Can Be Anything” is only a minor adaptation of the 1980 tagline “We Girls Can Do Anything”.Barbie debuted as a doctor in 1972, a presidential candidate in 1992, and pioneer of space exploration four years before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969. More recently, astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti was immortalised as a doll, which accompanied her into space, and scientist Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock has also been honoured in doll form. Individually, these might only be token gestures, but taken together over 65 years, Barbie’s consistent acknowledgement of female achievement takes on the significance of an alternative archive.

Wonderful as Barbie is, all is not entirely well. If you’re yet to be convinced by the power of Barbie, take a look at the pop-up shop at the entrance to the Design Museum, an institution that champions sustainability and promotes the hashtag #EndTheWasteAge, but has elected nevertheless to flog piles of pink plastic jelly bags in homage to the little lady. Barbie’s relentless career progression took her into “Eco-leadership” in 2022: I for one want her to be around for ever, but in a good way, not still failing to biodegrade 500 years from now.

‘Barbie: The Exhibition’ is at The Design Museum, London, Saturday 5 July to 23 February 2025