Barbie Girl

Customizing Barbies is a mixture of vision, art, painstaking work, and clever display.  Why some collectors just flip over customized Barbies may be hard to understand until you realize what all goes into the process itself.  For those who turn up their noses at these dolls, the usual rationale is that they are little more than a played with doll, where the adult collectors did a bit of hairstyling, added a new dress, and maybe added some accessories from a different doll.  While in essence this may be correct, it is also a much too simplistic view of the entire process, and should not be mistaken for such.

As a matter of fact, customizing Barbie dolls is serious business!   Just take a look at the steps that are quite often involved.

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Who is Barbie?  Sure, you know that she is considered a cultural icon, that she has shaped fashions just as she has imitated them, and you may also know that she has come under quite a bit of fire in modern times.  How did this doll – which has a figure that defies the laws of gravity and nature – capture the hearts and minds of generations of girls?  How did Barbie manage to have so many accessories created just for her? 

Here is a look at Barbie from the beginning – a brief bio of this cultural icon!

Barbie was first born on March 9, 1959.  Her role in the doll line-up of the time was that of a teenage fashion doll.

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