Barbie®: The Exhibition

Now I love an exhibition, but a sunny day in London sometimes doesn’t lend itself to spending a couple of hours inside. However, Barbie® : The Exhibition is so joyful and optimistic, it feels made for summer.

This highly anticipated exhibition at the Design Museum celebrates Barbie’s 65th anniversary and explores everything from her history to how her design has evolved and her impact on society. Visually, it looks exactly how you want it to look. Spread across five rooms, it’s bright, glossy and fun, including a chandelier made of her hair. 

It starts with a bang with the first ever Barbie doll made in 1959. She rotates inside a glass box with a neon pink Barbie sign above her head, whilst the first ever Barbie advert plays on a screen beside her. It’s partly hilarious, partly depressing to think that adverts like this were ever made. 

One of the most popular rooms showcases the transformation of Barbie with each doll lit up inside a brightly coloured box that fan out around the room like a rainbow. Viewers can literally see how she has transformed and moved with the times. Barbie, once only identifiable by her blonde hair and tiny waist, now comes in multiple skin tones, with a variety of hair textures and a far more accurate representation of body types. 

Despite the huge amount of content it covers, the exhibition is well paced and doesn’t feel too long or overwhelming. There are fascinating insights into how Barbie’s career journey and the design of her houses and cars has been influenced by society around her. Barbie’s first DreamHouse in 1962 positioned her as a independent, self made woman when ironically for the women at the time it was impossible to gain a mortgage without a male guarantor.

Apart from a life size Barbie box at the entrance, it seemed a bit strange there wasn’t more of an interactive element to the exhibition, particularly given there were a lot of children in attendance. However one nice touch was the ‘Borrow a Barbie’ section, where children could pick a Barbie to carry around the exhibition if they felt it would help them enjoy the experience more.

As an exhibition, it’s incredibly pro-Barbie, and doesn’t really delve into any negative connotations of the brand, however you can’t deny the positive vibes it brings.