Girls’ First Lady, Barbie, Dresses Part for Exhibit
She has piloted aircraft and been launched into space. She has treated wounded soldiers and dominated company boardrooms.
But now, at 41, Barbie is headed for the White House, and she has the designer gowns to prove it.
The 11 1/2-inch doll adored by little girls for decades has brought her sartorial style to the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace, which on Saturday opened a seven-month exhibit featuring “Barbie as First Lady: Gowns and Patriotic Costumes of America’s Legendary Leading Lady.”
The Yorba Linda library is showing off 115 Barbies modeling outfits that collectors painstakingly modeled on gowns worn by the country’s first ladies.
On display are dolls donned in everything from a dress of hand-painted indigenous flowers identical to one worn by Martha Washington to a replica of the dress Hillary Rodham Clinton wore at her husband’s first inauguration--a violet chiffon and lace gown studded with crystal beads.
It was Clinton’s outfit that caught the gaze of 6-year-old Claire Lawrence.
Her sister, Ann, 11, preferred Nancy Reagan’s dress--white tulle over a silk sheath encrusted with 2,000 beads specially hand-sewn into the fabric, just like the 1981 original.
“The girls love it because they play with Barbie,” Lorna Lawrence of Santa Clarita said. “I still have mine. Barbie can do anything now.”
Like many first ladies, Barbie has drawn her fair share of criticism.
Feminists have charged that the doll promotes sexism and, because of her very slender shape, even has caused an epidemic of anorexia and other eating disorders.
But exhibit organizers dismissed the criticism.
Barbie “is a blank canvas for little girls, for them to think about what they want to be, what mark they want to leave on the world,” said Evie Lazzarino, a spokeswoman for the Nixon Library.
And as if to prove the point, the exhibit mounted as its final display a special “Barbie for President” doll, demonstrating that despite her critics, the much-maligned doll can at least keep one step ahead of American politics.
“We like to think about what the first man will wear,” Lazzarino said.
“We have a lot of Kens waiting in line.”
