NEW YORK (AFP) - Accused of promoting anorexia and distort the image of women from an early age, with fewer sales and besieged by competition from others, the famous doll Barbie crisis comes at age 50.
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Barbara Millicent Robert was born on March 9, 1959 in Willows, in the northern state of Wisconsin. This toy, 29 inches tall, with endless legs and bust too high to be true, smashed all records after causing a furor in the same year Tradeshow in New York.
With 300,000 copies sold in that first year, the best-selling toy in the world today, which ended with the member chubby dolls, now draws more than 70 fashion designers, including the most famous.
His fan club has 18 million members, socialize on Facebook and Myspace, and revolutionized the world of children and the adults who tried many times to make resistance. Women born behind the Iron Curtain admitted having dreamed of a life Barbie and many women become mothers now preserved with love and pride in their collection.
Fashion Week which opens in New York on February 12, scheduled an event where 50 designers held about the Barbie "as an icon of fashion" and presented a parade in the three temporal dimensions (past, present and future). The French shoe maker Christian Louboutin dress your feet.
The designer Vera Wang created the wedding dress will sell for $ 15,000 in real size version. The doll with the same model costs $ 159.99 at Toys "R" Us in Times Square, where a whole section of the store is dedicated to him, turned into a palace where the rose is ubiquitous.
Toy maker Mattel, "father" of Barbie, has just signed a contract with the Association of American creators. Its president, Diane von Furstenberg Barbie defines as "an independent woman and self-assured, gifted with an extraordinary ability to have fun while still being elegant."
The publisher Assouline luxury published a book entitled "Barbie", which goes on sale for $ 500 and show the doll dressed in Prada, Karl Lagerfeld and Alexander McQueen.
Of the 108 occupations, Barbie had all the clothes and accessories clothes possible 1000 million according to its official site, and especially a uniform approved by the Pentagon the day he enlisted in the Army in 1989.
After their looks a la Grace Kelly in the 60's, went to Woodstock in the 70's, became an entrepreneur in the 80 and ran for the White House in 1992. She broke with her boyfriend Ken in 2004, making rivers of ink.
But beyond having lost his partner, the days of Barbie are in danger because sales fell again in 2008, for the seventh consecutive year since the appearance of competence Bratz, a doll head and enormous eyes clothing that reveals the navel attribute that Barbie did not comply until 2000. Mattel believes that owns the rights to Bratz product created by an employee and launched in 2001 by MGA Entertainment. A trial with multiple incidents has ruled in favor of either party.
And to complicate matters, Barbie and the manufacturer should bear the publication of "Toy-Monster: Mattel wicked world, where its author, Jerry Oppenheimer, reveals, among other things, the sexual life of Jack Ryan, the engineer headed out of Barbie and Ken.
