Step inside a Barbie world at the Design Museum’s new Barbie exhibition

After last year’s Barbenheimer juggernaut, the Design Museum was faced with a choice for its next exhibition — dolls or bombs? They went with dolls, lots and lots of dolls.

All different and yet all the same.

In the toy world, a brand that lasts half a decade is considered a success, so what to make of Barbie — a doll that’s been around for 13 half-decades and is still going strong?

Barbie was born 65 years ago into a world where children’s dolls were expected to be cherubic and chubby, and when the radically different Barbie stepped out of the plastic factory, children clamoured for her. The Design Museum has managed to buy one of those first Barbies, which are now hugely valuable, so unsurprisingly, their exhibition opens with their prize acquisition, slowly spinning on a dais in a glass case.

The rest of the exhibition is very much more of the same — for while Barbie has changed over the decades, it can feel oddly as if nothing really changes. Yes, the clothes, the fashions, and the accessories all change with the times, but the core concept remains sacrosanct.

The exhibition’s design taps into the nostalgia of the early years, feeling very much as if you’ve stepped back into the 1950s aesthetic of soft pastel colours, but there are a few fun twists in the displays.

The case showing the range of Barbie’s hair fashions sits underneath a chandelier made from Barbie’s hair. An opening room of Barbies floating in small cases was beautiful, yet feeling slightly like an alien collecting specimens of humans to take home.

As someone who didn’t play with dolls as a kid — I have a vague memory of once being given an Action Man and wondering what to do with it — the very obvious connection with their childhood that many of the ladies in the room were having was somewhat lost on me.

The exhibition has, in fact, been designed not to explicitly appeal to children but to adults looking back at their childhood. It’s much more focused on Barbie’s design and culture than on being a playground.

As it happens, adults now make up the fastest-growing customer base in the toy industry — partly because fewer children are being born, but all those adults with much deeper wallets than they had as children are now buying collectables of their childhood memories.

Amongst the very many Barbies in this matriarchal world, there’s just one small case of Kens — including 1993 Earring Magic Ken, which was famously nicknamed “gay ken” in the media. I owned one, having as a usually very introverted young man plucked up the courage to walk into Hamleys and ask for Gay Ken, to be met by a bemused sales assistant. I seem to have disposed of Gay Ken at some point in my flatshare downsizings, which having seen how much they sell for on eBay was a painful mistake to have made.

As the exhibition curator, Danielle Thom, explained, part of the success of the Barbie brand is that Barbie isn’t a trendsetter. She most certainly responds to changing times but never tries to set the agenda too overtly. And with a lead time of around a year from concept to appearing in the shops, her fashion could be said to be more M&S than Selfridges.

That safe, slightly staid approach, always changing but never too fast, seems to have ensured Barbie’s enduring appeal to generation after generation of girls and increasingly to adults.

Hopefully, one day, Barbie will discover the delights of public transport—as, based on the exhibition, she seems to be rather keen on the motor car but not the bus or cycling. Architecture fans might be keener on seeing the many large houses that Barbie seems to have lived in over the decades, some of which would probably be sold today by an aggressive estate agent as ideal for a London flatshare.

The exhibition can be seen as a chance to see all the Barbies that people will remember from their youth, but it is also an education in the design processes that go into ensuring that children will continue to put demands on their parents’ wallets.

As you might have noticed, a lot of thought has gone into creating the Barbie world within the exhibition space’s design, but there’s a bit of an “easter egg” to seek out.

Earlier this year, the Italian design house, Kartell released a range of small Barbie chairs, which are on display in the exhibition. But for the exhibition, there are five full-size replicas of the model chairs — for the staff to sit in. One member of staff told me they even had to double-check that the special pink chairs were for them to sit in and not exhibits to be looked at.

And that’s a nice touch.

The exhibition, Barbie: The Exhibition is at the Design Museum until 23rd Feb 2025. Tickets are available from here.

Off-peak ticket prices:

• Adults: £16
• Children: £8
• Concessions: £12
• National Art Pass: £8
• Family (1a + 3c): £34
• Family (2a + 3c): £44

Peak ticket prices:

• Adults: £18
• Children: £9
• Concessions: £13.50
• National Art Pass: £9
• Family (1a + 3c): £38
• Family (2a + 3c): £49