Barbie Dreamhouses

Barbie was born in 1962 and three years later moved into her first Barbie’s Dreamhouse. It was a folding ranch house made of cardboard, built for a down-to-earth, independent Midwestern girl.

Barbie wasn’t destined to live without fancier digs for long. Perenially-single, she held her own mortgage and kept movin’ on up.

Learn About Barbitecture

To celebrate her influence on American design and architecture, Mattel collaborated with the design magazine PIN-UP on a limited-edition art book, “Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey.”

“Barbie’s house is infinitely more exciting than Barbie herself,” writes Elvia Wilk, a cultural critic. “The structures we live within — fantasize about living within — say more about our lives and dreams than plastic bodies ever will.”

The New York Times breaks down the Barbitecture story with A Six-Decade Tour of Barbie’s Dreamhouses and AOC gifts readers the link.

Wilk is one of many critics who contribute to the book’s analysis of Barbie’s huge influence on American culture.

Mattel Had Shortcomings in the Barbie Story: Barbie Couldn’t Code

Not everything Barbie has done since 1962 has been feminist. We hear about unconscious bias in race. But what about unconscious bias in women’s capacity in science and math?

In this 2018 TED x Shadé Zahrai talk at Australia’s Monash University, the best-selling author explains the stunning fact that as recently as 2010, Barbie was tech literate with her pink laptop but the story went downhill after that.

In her TED x Talk, the Harvard-trained leadership coach with a keen interest in neuroscience speaks of her family’s background, which is Persian.

Zahrai was obsessive about Barbie and considered her to be a great role model for young women with a Persian or modern-day Iran background. Her educated professional family with an unusually broad commitment to women’s equality had to leave their country after the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the 1979 revolution.

In the no-longer-in-print Mattel book, Barbie was working on designing a computer game. That was the good part of the story. The bad part involved Barbie believing that she couldn’t continue without help, because Barbie couldn’t code. Barbie explained that she needed Steve and Brian to write the code her game.

Then Barbie got a virus in her sister’s laptop and — once again — she needed the guys Steve and Brian to get rid of the computer virus.

Clearly, Barbie was a few years shy of being able to attend Kode With Klossy, supermodel Karlie Kloss’s coding camp for young women.

Barbie Trailer for July 21, 2023 Opening

Barbie arrived this weekend, introduced by a familiar voice — Dame Helen Mirren — as a towering goddess with endless legs. She descends from the heavens in a primal sort of way straight out of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.

“Since the beginning of time, since the first little girl ever existed, there have been dolls,”Mirren narrates the opening. “But the dolls were always and forever baby dolls, until . . .

. . . actor Margot Robbie, wearing a black-and-white strapless swimsuit, cat-eye glasses, and blond bangs creates chaos in Mother Earth’s playroom.

In an instant the little girls are throwing their baby dolls to bits, smashing them in a single moment.

It’s as if Betty Friedan, Simone de Bouvoir, Shirley Chisholm, Gloria Steinem, Gertrude Stein, Nina Simone, Frida Kahlo and — yes — Angela Davis rose up in a single moment of femme power that gave those little girls a new version of what little girls can do when they grow up.

‘Barbie’ Premiere July 21, 2023

Margot Robbie as Barbie stars opposite Ryan Gosling’s Ken, Robbie is producing the film through her production company LuckyChap Entertainment. Mattel Films and HeyDay Films will co-produce.

The supporting cast includes America Ferrera, Simu Liu, Kate McKinnon, Alexandra Shipp, Emma Mackey, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Issa Rae, Michael Cera and more.

The “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” star admitted that the film “comes with a lot of baggage and a lot of nostalgic connections” to honor the doll’s legacy. “But with that come a lot of exciting ways to attack it,” Robbie said to British Vogue. “People generally hear ‘Barbie’ and think, ‘I know what that movie is going to be,’ and then they hear that Greta Gerwig is writing and directing it, and they’re like, ’Oh, well, maybe I don’t…’”

Related: Ryan Gosling tells an amazing story about deciding to play Ken in the Barbie movie. We shared his strange moment in our review of Gucci’s campaign for their new ‘Valigeria’ luggage campaign: Ryan Gosling for Fall 2022 Gucci 'Valigeria' Luggage Campaign by Glen Luchford AOC Fashion