Barbie Garb
All the fuss over last year’s “Barbie” movie started me thinking about my old Barbie. I still had her, and recently, I pulled her out of my closet. I was nine when my parents bought her for me as a Hanukkah present, in 1960, just months after she first hit the toy market and changed American doll culture forever. Instead of playing mommy to our baby dolls, little girls like me were now acting out other fantasies with Barbie, a 12-inch simulacrum of a sexy young woman with a ridiculously proportioned body.
And now, 60-plus years later, there I was, examining my Barbie in all her blond bubble-cut splendor and permanently blue-eyeshadowed lids, snug in her original shiny black carrying case with built-in cardboard drawer and little plastic hangers for the extensive wardrobe that the Mattel toy company marketed along with the doll.
But I didn’t ask my parents to buy clothes for my Barbie. For some reason I couldn’t have articulated at the time, I preferred to make them myself. A morose, depressed child, I was on the chubby side and ill at ease in my own body, which would soon mature into one just like my big-breasted, big-tuchused, full-thighed grandmother. My physical coordination was poor, and no matter how hard I tried, my body refused to follow the instructions of Miss Holtzer, our gym teacher. “What are you doing?” she snapped at me one day, after I made a disastrous attempt at a high jump that landed me flat on my belly.
Luckily, there was a way for me to escape Miss Holtzer and the shame I felt over my clumsiness. Every day, after the final bell rang at three, I raced home to sew clothes for my Barbie. I used the frayed ribbons and worn nylon slips in the schmatte bag that my mother kept, she, a child of the Great Depression, who never threw anything away. Other options for doll clothes material included delicious scraps of satin and corduroy that I’d picked out of the remnant bin in Paterson Silks on Union Square, to where my grandmother occasionally took me on Saturday excursions specifically devoted to stocking my fabric stash.
In my room after school, I’d spread these pieces of fabric carefully on the floor, right next to my Barbie, and devise beautiful clothes for her. Some were replicas of outfits that my wisp of a mother, who never weighed more than 100 pounds her entire life, chose to wear. I desperately envied my mother’s tiny, perfect frame—obviously, my grandmother’s genes had skipped a generation—and I found her in my Barbie, who also existed as a stand-in for me. Alice’s doppelganger, the one in my fantasies, had, like Barbie, a teensy waist and butt.
For Barbie, I hand-sewed a complete wardrobe with tiny stitches, including accessories, all of which I found myself a few months ago examining carefully with my granddaughters, ages four and seven. A green corduroy number with a skinny skirt. A fitted white top with perfect seams and tiny darts, fashioned out of a cotton scrap from a sheet that was old 60 years ago. A flannel suit in aqua, with veiled pillbox hat to match, a la Jackie Kennedy. A sparkly knee-length sheath with a carefully edged boat neckline, that was a more flamboyant version of one that my mother wore to Saturday night dinner parties. My Barbie also had a 1920s flapper-style dress of midnight blue satin with a white ruffle attached to the hemline, accented with a long strand of tiny beads harvested from my grandmother’s cheap fake pearl necklace. For cold nights out on the town, I made Barbie a snugly-fitted black velvet theater coat with lapels that closed with a single large rhinestone button. And she had a wedding gown of white satin, long and elaborate, with elaborate ruching and French seams, complete with wedding veil, and a pair of long gloves fashioned from the elasticized edges of an ancient pair of women’s gottkes (long underpants), for her marriage to Ken.
Both my mother and grandmother marveled at my handiwork skills, and wondered how I could have learned them. It is a mystery. My mother never sewed, nor did my grandmother. Bubbe crocheted, but none of her creations displayed anything near the intricacy of the clothes that I made for my Barbie. Could this special talent have been passed along to me via DNA? In Europe, Jews practiced the needle trades for centuries. Later, they brought their skills to America, and started their trajectory out of the ghetto by selling rags or working in sweatshops. Perhaps one of my ancestors was a fabulous seamstress, just like me.
I have passed along Barbie, complete with her wardrobe, to my two granddaughters, who are 4 and 7. I am intrigued by how interested they are in her, and, most of all, the clothes that I sewed for her all those years ago, when I was that little Jewish girl who felt so uncomfortable in her own body. They dress Barbie in these hand-made garments, and carefully examine each one. Once, the rhinestone button on the black velvet coat came off, and they insisted that I sew it back on, immediately, as they were in the middle of an elaborate scenario in which Barbie was on her way to a fashion show. I obeyed, of course. As I threaded the needle, I realized that I had originally sewn on that buttom some 65 years ago.
Recently the girls pretended that Barbie, all farputzed (dressed up) in that wedding gown, was marrying another of my old dolls, a paper-mache kewpie that I inherited from my mother. “There are two brides!” one of the girls brightly remarked, and it occurred to me that Barbie, in the hands of my granddaughters, has taken on a new role. Through the clothes that I stitched for her, Barbie passes on my memories and associations to these little girls, who live in such a drastically different world than the one of my post-World War 2 childhood. Every one of these little garments carries a narrative that no store-bought wardrobe could transmit, and stretches all the way back to the Pale of Settlement.
