Barbie… this gorgeous plastic doll has been maligned in recent many years, pegged because the reason behind eating disorders, body dysmorphia and cosmetic surgery obsessions, not to say the poster child for American overconsumption. Nevertheless it’s easy to forget Barbie’s origin: she was the primary doll for ladies that modelled a latest type of womanhood. Barbie is a bachelorette and lives by herself in a glamorous home she pays for with a profession of her selecting. She has equally affluent girlfriends; she has a person but doesn’t need one. Ken, her himbo boyfriend, is more of a metrosexual accessory than an old-school patriarchal provider.

Whitney Mallett, the world’s premier Barbie historian, recently released a book exploring the evolution of Barbie’s Dreamhouse with PIN–UP, a publisher specialising in “architectural entertainment”. Tracing the history of Barbie’s living spaces, from the late 60s to the current, Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey casts Barbie in a latest light – and ties in neatly with Greta Gerwig’s cinematic take, out this week. I spoke with Mallett to get some insight into her latest publication, and what she feels Barbie saccharine aesthetics can teach us today.

Twiddling with Barbie, like many other pastimes related to young girls, is usually considered frivolous, airheaded… how does it feel applying a more serious architectural lens to the famous Dreamhouse?

Whitney Mallett: To be serious in regards to the frivolous is textbook camp. So definitely our project’s gall and brilliance is dependent upon the context of how Barbie’s world had been underestimated and never previously considered worthy of significant design criticism, and it’s reinforced in how Ben Ganz designed the book fidgeting with the ‘serious’ signifiers of an architectural monograph.

It felt fun to dig into the fabric for the Barbie Dreamhouse book. There was a freeness to not having any real Barbietecture antecedents, a lot of the writing had been more gender-y. There are definitely antecedents within the architecture history space, by way of applying a rigorous theoretical lens to pop cultural phenomenon, the queen of that’s Beatriz Colomina, whose many many books and exhibitions include a study of Playboy architecture, and who we were really lucky to have contribute to the book. She put the Barbie Dreamhouse (which is importantly a dream house for a single lady) in an interesting lineage, a part of a retelling of housing for bachelors and bachelorettes as a crucial a part of the history of Modernism, which gets overshadowed by the story of Modernist housing for the family unit.

I believe there’s real excitement and true moments of epiphany while you start unpacking such a pervasive cultural text like Barbie’s world. It’s like we all know all things about it intuitively but we haven’t sat down and thought much about it. I feel like I got here away from it with more knowledge of self, which could sound funny. But here’s this product with a somewhat programmatic function (dollhouses model domestic life for youngsters) and its evolution has absorbed so many elements of Twentieth-century architecture history and broader cultural history. So to grasp higher the fabric history of a toy that influenced me, I feel like I’m learning about myself. Also, my co-editor Felix Burrichter played with Barbies too. So I believe it’s vital our perspective can also be from this place of expanding the narrative of Barbies and remembering there’s an extended history of their codified usage being queered.

Evelyn Pustka’s photography of the Dreamhouse to your book with PIN-UP, Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey, is incredible; what was her process like?

Whitney Mallett: I’m so in awe of Evelyn’s photos. To begin with, she had relatively limited time with the Dreamhouses. She shot them on-site at Mattel’s headquarters, and he or she needed to go in and figure all the things out in just a pair days. The best way she lit the homes, their enigmatic glow, it really captures the magic of how these small plastic (and cardboard within the early days) toys make entire worlds. It was vital to not have any Barbie dolls within the shots. And with none dolls, especially these close-ups of furnished rooms, I feel like there’s this slipperiness where you may forget their scale and project yourself right into the rooms. It’s a reminder that the doll is ultimately only a proxy for what we wish after we play, we wish to be in the total fantasy. And I also love how she shot the person pieces of furniture with this soft austerity. There’s an uncanny effect where a few of their toyetic qualities are amplified, but again there’s not lots of context for scale, so that you imagine yourself sitting in a chair or lying down on a bed. 

Are there any artists you want which can be exploring Barbie, and dolls usually, in a way you discover interesting? I immediately consider Portia Munson’s hyper-feminine exploration of mass production, “The Pink Bedroom”, installed within the Museum of Sex, scented by Marissa Zappas to evoke the smell of plastic dolls… 

Whitney Mallett: I even have a roller of Marissa’s “The Pink Bedroom” literally right here on my desk. I really like how nasty it’s, that sharp artificial smell. It jogs my memory of this Baby All-Gone doll I had and the addictive synthetic scent of her jar of cherries. Rubber, plastic, industrial miracle materials developed for WWII, these are what Barbies are born from. After we write her off as just girly in this fashion, I believe we totally dismiss how cyborgian she is. She is literally shaped like a war-time fighter jet. And he or she has no toilet and no kitchen within the early Dreamhouses. Architect Mark Wigley said something so smart that I loved, but didn’t quite fit into the book, so I’ll just quote it directly here: “Within the early Dreamhouses, there appears to be a form of distancing from the biological; like Barbie herself, the home has no liquids. It’s architecture for a body that doesn’t sweat or smell. The final word dream of radical singlehood is you’re not only without other people, you’re also without your insides.”

“Industrial miracle materials developed for WWII, these are what Barbies are born from. After we write her off as just girly in this fashion, I believe we totally dismiss how cyborgian she is. She is literally shaped like a war-time fighter jet” – Whitney Mallett

Spending a lot time last 12 months studying the Barbie Dreamhouses and their American Dream of the aspirational home, I discovered myself considering rather a lot in regards to the work of this artist Julie Becker. She passed away in 2016 when she was only 40-something, but before that she made lots of work that’s dollhouse-y, or like an architectural model, but in a way that captures the underbelly of that American Dream, the nightmare that’s too many individuals’s reality: living precariously. She made these sprawling installations with domestic vignettes of hoarders’ quarters, a lot heart-breakingly miniature stuff that signaled someone sleeping of their office or staying in single-room occupancy hotels and motels, what’s considered the last stop to houselessness. Becker’s wider body of labor can also be shot through with fantasy too – there are sparkles and video art remixing minor canon Disney movies, all with a psychological naive eeriness that jogs my memory slightly of Mike Kelley – which makes it much more an interesting correlative to the Dreamhouse. 

After I was filming with considered one of the Dreamhouses, I by chance recreated this photograph by Laurie Simmons (Lena Dunham’s mom) which incorporates a dollhouse with a girl’s set of legs (Walking House, 1989). With regards to Barbie art, Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988) is canon. I really like Maggie Lee’s I Want To Imagine series (2016), which turned aquariums and hamster cages into teen bedrooms for Jenny dolls. And probably the most iconic social practice art I’ve ever experienced is the Dreamhouse, this community-run queer nightlife project which had a everlasting space 2016 to 2019 and lives on in numerous forms, they’re on Instagram as @dreamhouse4dolls — “for gays, dolls, and dreams.” One in all the founders, Gage Spex, got here up with the name for an early MySpace, deciding they weren’t Barbie or Ken however the Dreamhouse.

Did you ever play with Barbies as a baby yourself? How have your thoughts on the Dreamhouse evolved because you were young? Did you ever undergo a period of being repulsed by what Barbie represents?

Whitney Mallett: I played with Barbies on a regular basis, they usually were totally formative for developing how I tell stories. Also Aqua was the primary record I purchased due to the “Barbie Girl” single. I never had a Dreamhouse (though at my Grandma’s I did have the Dreamcamper RV), but like everyone did in their very own way, I made DIY architecture for my Barbies. My best was turning this white Ikea shelving unit right into a make-shift condo tower, and once I give it some thought, my ad-hoc homestead was more just like the 2021-era Dreamhouse than the neo-Victorian Dreamhouse Mattel was making on the time, so let’s say I used to be an early adopter of Barbie’s return to boxy Modernism.

I definitely had some growing pains with bimbo femininity and high pink girliness which Barbie feels synonymous with. My mom is a Barbie and growing up there have been intense mother-daughter feuds related to her wanting my hair to be blonde and straight like hers. In my twenties I used to be attempting to figure it out, how much I used to be going to speculate in being reactionary to that, and the way I felt in regards to the arc from riot grrrl to selfie feminism. That’s actually why I first reached out to you, like a decade ago! I actually related to a few of your writing online, processing this repulsion and understanding it as socially-conditioned misogyny. You’d pinpointed back then a cohort of artists of our generation who were intentionally fidgeting with girliness and the negative reactions they knew it will trigger. Now ten years later, it’s like we’ve collectively reclaimed Barbiecore. It’s a lean-in poptimism, Elle Woods for president moment. And we’re all of the Young-Girl, consumer society’s model citizen. With all these Barbie movie-related Burger King pink hamburger-type collabs that is an incredible time to read or re-read Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (translated into English for Semiotext(e) by Ariana Reines, also considered one of our best living poets).

Do you’ve gotten a favourite Dreamhouse?

Whitney Mallett: I’m keen on the 1979 Dreamhouse, the A-Frame, which has these big skylights, a developed attic with exposed beams, really funky furniture, and a color palette you wouldn’t expect from Barbie: red and yellow. But now I’ve also got obsessive about the Dreamhouse they made for the Ice Spice and Nicki Minaj music video (above). Like on the very starting, they’ve a Barbie-scale playhouse, before we enter the fantasy world and the environment turns CGI: this home is in some ways a hybrid of the 1979 Dreamhouse and the 2023 Dreamhouses (each the most recent toy and the Margot Robbie movie house). Prefer it has one of the best furniture from the 1979 house, including a settee that’s very Togo, and one of the best furniture from the most recent editions of the 2020s Dreamhouses, like a dangling chair. It has the MCM-but-make-it-pink detailing from the movie’s Dreamhouse, the stone chimney and breeze block wall. Then its roofline, these two intersecting slightly-pitched roofs, feels again prefer it’s borrowing elements from all these different Dreamhouses but making something that’s ultimately its own and in my view the chicest of all. And funky-cute, it has these clear coloured plastic room partitions I really like that remind me of the Eames House (1949), but in addition in a way like Y2K inflatable furniture. In my head, it’s the home for the pink sauce girl to retire to in Palm Springs after she sells enough pink sauce on TikTok.

Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey is out now

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