It started in April, with the Barbie x Ruggable washable rugs. By May, Barbie had a low-calorie pink lemonade, limited-edition fuschia Xbox controllers and a line of “on-chain virtual collectibles” designed to “help women access Web3.0”. Soon, Barbie was on Gap apparel, Starbucks cups, Superga shoes and Funboy pool floats; she was at Primark, Bloomingdales, a dedicated Amazon store, two pop-up cafes in New York and Chicago, an immersive museum in Los Angeles and a Barbie boat cruise around the Boston Harbor.
By July, the media rollout for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie had unleashed a torrent of press photos, TikTok filters, promotional interviews, trailer footage and more than 100 Barbie-licensed products on to the internet. The $145m Warner Bros blockbuster is Gerwig’s attempt, as she told the New York Times, at “doing the thing and subverting the thing” – where the subversion is a sardonic twist on the famous doll’s saga, and the thing is boosting sales. To aid the latter, Mattel has spared no expense getting out the word. “It’ll be very hard to be on planet Earth,” its CEO, Ynon Kreiz, has said, “and not know this movie’s coming out.” The campaign was so thoroughly pink, so omnipresent, so peppered with product tie-ins, that jokes about Barbie’s marketing briefly seemed to outnumber those aimed at the doll itself.
Amid the press coverage, however, one Barbie event drew surprisingly scant attention: the National Barbie Doll Collectors Convention (NBDCC). To year-round Barbie fans, it’s akin to Bonnaroo or Burning Man, an annual pilgrimage for five days of doll-centric celebration, which takes place in a different city every year. It is a place to expand collections, to offload high-value assets (some dolls sell for more than $10,000), and to engage with the few people on Earth who share an encyclopedic expertise in every Barbie iteration, outfit or accessory dating back to 1959.
This year, it took place in Orlando from 4 to 8 July, overlapping with the film’s global cast tour to six different cities, and ending on the eve of its Hollywood premiere.
The convention was perfectly timed for the press campaign, and yet mentions of it were nearly nonexistent in the media. Perhaps because, unlike every other aspect of Barbiemania, this event was not orchestrated by Mattel. It is an entirely fan-driven operation, painstakingly put on by various collectors clubs scattered around the country. There is no big ad budget or spare cash to comp press passes, and my emails to request the latter routinely went rejected. The convention’s DIY, word-of-mouth advertising has inadvertently made it as much a secret as the plot of the movie before its release.
Despite its low-profile, the 850-person convention, held every year since 1980, sells out almost instantly. There is a waitlist, though only the earliest birds stand a chance of flying off it. I signed up for my slot in September. But when the conference kicked off on 4 July, my would-be registration was still wallowing in standby obscurity.
I had given up hope when one Barbie forum poster advised me that Orlando locals could wait at late registration. That’s how I wound up checking into the Hyatt Regency Orlando (a sprawling 1,641-room resort whose 315,000 sq ft of “flexible event space” has won it “Florida’s #1 Convention Property” five years running) the morning after Independence Day.
The convention’s absence from the Barbie movie campaign is somewhat confounding, because it fits neatly with the rebrand Mattel has spent several years trying to sell. The event is an organic illustration of Barbie’s wide reach, contra to her reputation as a shiksa stereotype. The aisles crowd with strollers and walkers alike; the events accommodate a wide range of special needs; the racial makeup splits more evenly than the census. Women mill with (admittedly fewer, but nevertheless numerous) men and the gender-nonconforming; the rich browse by the poor (one woman dropped some $20,000 at an auction without breaking a sweat; another, forking over a late ticket fee, mourned losing a year’s vacation money). And even politics seem to be, however briefly, set aside. “I never ask anyone about politics,” one tablemate told me. “I don’t need to know.” In this world, there’s only one affinity that matters, and it involves an 11.5in figurine.
***
While trying to find the convention, I took the elevator with a pink-clad woman whose Barbie lanyard suggested she knew where to go. A Barbie tote bag dangled from her walker. The 30-year collector had played with dolls as a child, but gave them away in her teens. “A woman I knew told me she didn’t have money to get her kids anything for Christmas, so I gave them to her,” she explained, as the elevator dropped. “I felt good about that, but as soon as I handed them off, I started to cry.”
The doors opened as she recounted the years she’d spent saving and spending, gradually amassing the exact assortment of dolls she’d acquired as a child.
This impulse to reproduce in exactitude the playscape of one’s past would prove common among conventioneers I met, as if shoring up the same childhood dolls, down to the precise 1962 “Fleecy Peachy” white coat or 1959 “Apple Print Sheath”, could, like historical re-enactment or restoring baroque instruments, preserve some quality of that time that might outlast them. (This can have unintended consequences; another group of conventioneers mentioned a father-daughter team who kept their ultra-valuable collection in a storage locker. When they died within months of each other, their descendants had no idea where it was.)
I was still trying to score a ticket to the main event. But in the meantime, a volunteer named “Barbie” told me, hangers-on had some options. The convention has a tradition of what’s called “room shopping” – Barbie collectors will convert their double-queen suites into pop-up merch stores, with elaborate displays straight out of FAO Schwarz. Some fans come for this feature alone, sometimes a week early; it’s the only place vendors can sell unofficial paraphernalia, like homemade accessories, the risqué “Integrity” collections, or Barbie’s rare German predecessor, Bild Lilli. I went back up the elevator to find hallways dotted with propped-open doors decorated in pink. Migrating between rouge rooms amounts to a crash course in collector argot: “NRFB” for “Never Removed From Box”, “OOAK” for “One Of A Kind”, and “No 1” or “Ponytail”, for the much-desired first Barbie edition, produced for little more than a month in 1959.
The next day, I showed up at late registration around 8am. A goateed man in a Barbie T-shirt was already camped out front. He’d brought a pillow, having been there since 5.30am. His name, it turned out, was Ken. It first seemed incredible that, within 24 hours of arriving, I’d meet two guests named Barbie and Ken but I learned those names abound in the collector world. Many of the Barbies and Kens at the convention had been drawn to the toys precisely because of the sobriquets they had in common. According to the NBDCC 2023 program, which excludes late registrants, there were at least two other Kens, a Kendall and 12 Barbaras in attendance – seven of whom were dedicated volunteers.
When I finally bought my ticket, I received a name tag, a Barbie-branded tote, and a table number. The convention has several recurring attractions: a human-sized fashion show, a doll competition, a raffle, two sales rooms, auctions both live and silent – but the meals are the fulcrum around which everything revolves. Table assignments are therefore key to a good time. Many conventioneers plan their tables well in advance; others make a point of sitting somewhere random. At lunch, I was in the latter category.
The 10-person arrangement included a “Table Host”, assigned to steer the activities among each group, who sat beside her “travel Barbie” – a common accessory among conventioneers. (“I bring her with me everywhere,” she said. “Last year, we went to Paris.”) Eight, 10 and 11-year veterans sat alongside a young mother who, like me, had arrived alone and for the first time. Another tablemate, who tagged along with her niece, did not own a single doll. At least until that day. “I have three now,” she said.
Our most gregarious companion was Arnaldo, a landscape architect and natural storyteller whose hobby of refurbishing damaged dolls has made him into one of the highest-regarded doll doctors (Arnaldo asked me not to use his last name as, like many conventioneers, he prefers to keep his Barbie and professional lives separate). When he started in the 90s, Arnaldo told the table, restoration was quasi-taboo. “People were scared,” he said, “because they could be passed off as fakes.”
He helped normalize the practice: forging new Barbies from Frankensteinian spare parts, rebirthing the damaged not as original knockoffs, but individualized art objects. By now, he had attended 18 BarbieCons, the last 16 consecutively. His husband Dale, another tablemate, had started collecting Ken dolls to keep up with Arnaldo’s interest. At one point, Dale owned every Ken and Ken accessory, save for a single glass slipper (from Ken’s Cinderella Prince ensemble). “I couldn’t bring myself to spend $100 on one toy shoe,” he said. They got married a few years ago at the “Kenvention”, a short-lived offshoot of the NBDCC.
Another one of the reigning traditions of BarbieCon, I was embarrassed to learn too late, is gift-giving. “Get ready for some gifts,” Dale told me. Each meal opens a spigot of more swag. Every time I sat down, my chair was crowded with gift bags, tissue paper, and meticulously wrapped packages.
During one dinner, the emcee led the crowd in a silent meditation: “Close your eyes and imagine what you could buy with five extra dollars,” he intoned, increasing the amount in increments of five. “Now, imagine what you could buy with 50. Extra. Dollars.” From under the tablecloth, our host pulled out: 10 wooden Barbie bench swings, 10 Margot Robbie Barbies, 10 Barbie collectors’ pins, 10 Barbie blankets and 10 $50 saleroom gift cards. It was the toy equivalent of sitting in Oprah’s audience, only the episode lasted five days.
The most competitive, and surprisingly moving, moment came on the penultimate night, when the awards are handed out. This portion of the event was hosted by the Barbie designer Carol Spencer. In a world of miniatures, Spencer, who oversaw the doll’s wardrobe from 1963 to 1998, is the closest the Barbie fandom gets to a giant. The 90-year-old, still agile and omnipresent at Barbie events, announced the event’s Oscar: the “Barbie’s Best Friend Award”.
As Spencer took the stage, our table – crammed in a far corner – craned to see her, seated before a backdrop of a Barbie Dreamhouse. “I have been going to Barbie conventions since conventions began,” she said.
Spencer handed out trophies to two longtime volunteers, including one of the Barbaras. As she introduced the last honoree, her voice became garbled. “I’m presenting two awards to these partners, both in life and somewhere beyond all this,” she choked. A man took the stage and embraced her; the speech became still harder to hear. Eyes watered around the ballroom, including my own, though I had no idea what she was saying. “That’s a famous dealer,” Dale whispered. “His partner passed last year.”
This was the true attraction of BarbieCon: collectors are aware their obsession attracts sneers. The external disregard has made them secretive, but still more devoted to one another.
***
Mattel is not technically affiliated with BarbieCon, as the convention discloses on both its website and program. But the manufacturer is, at the very least, involved. The steering committee includes a “Mattel liaison”, and meals featured a designated Mattel table. Elsewhere, the company presented Barbie toy lines, screened an unreleased film clip and once exposed a still of Simu Liu – not yet approved for the public. “No one saw that,” said the designer Robert Best, scrambling to change slides. “That did not happen.”
But Mattel’s main contribution came at the weekend’s grand finale: a formal five-course dinner featuring the real reason collectors pounce so quickly on BarbieCon tickets: the annual convention doll. Each year, a Mattel designer creates a limited-edition Barbie exclusively for guests. You cannot buy them in stores, though some would sell theirs online (one way, Arnaldo told me, to recoup the convention’s $475 cost). The latest came from Angel Kent, a recent FIT grad and Mattel newcomer noticeable for his distinctly Ken-like look. The night before, a heckler had called for him to “take off his shirt”.
When the desserts cleared, the hosts pulled out boxes and passed them along each table. They were white and unlabeled, save a fine Barbie font. The air was tense, anticipatory. The tradition is to unbox all at once, and years earlier, the reveal had been greeted with groans (“Ugly face,” Arnaldo explained). One table discovered it didn’t have dolls; aides rushed off to find replacements. Suspense mounted. Then, the countdown started. The first sound was rustling cardboard; the second, screams. The doll was, to even my untrained eye, immaculate. She wore an iridescent asymmetrical gown, with tulle underskirts, silver accessories and a fur cape attached by dramatic white muffs. The next morning, I saw them selling on eBay for north of $800.
The rituals of BarbieCon and Mattel’s movie merch outpour share a common motivation: buying Barbies. But the kind of accumulation on display at the convention is more complex than the average gotta-catch-em-all mentality. Here, Barbie is both the center and a starting point; between sales and swaps, attendees studied at various workshops on everything from the intricacies of collectors’ insurance to “Making Doll Size Tropical Drinks”. And while conventioneers revere Mattel, they are clear-eyed about corporate priorities. During one such seminar, the collector and historian Bradley Justice Yarbrough was leading a panel on preserving Barbie collections, when an older man asked why certain Barbies’ faces paled dramatically over time.
“You’re right,” Yarbrough sighed. “I talked to a chemical engineer about that and you see it a lot in dolls from 1970 to 71. What happens is – this is going to get complicated, I’m sorry …”
Yarbrough launched into a detailed description of vinyl injection molding and how sculpting Barbie’s body parts yields a byproduct of excess plastic called slag. “It’s supposed to be thrown away,” he explained, “because once it’s remelted and reinjected, it’s no longer colorfast or chemically stable.” But occasionally, Mattel had dabbled in slag recycling, he went on, not least in the early 1970s. No one needed to ask what he meant: the SEC charged the manufacturer for fraudulent accounting in 1973.
Mattel had been “in financial difficulty, so they were trying to pinch pennies”, Yarbrough concluded. The discoloration “is just low-quality vinyl that they were trying to maximize and kept re-melting”.
The seminar on proper storage practices and cleaning protocols was not, as it may sound, dry, but a study in the breadth of amateur Barbie scholarship conducted by conventioneers. For two hours, Yarbrough took questions on rubbing alcohol concentrations, basement humidity monitors, the acidity of cardboard display boxes, and the chemical composition of Barbie’s plastic body parts – all tailored to the particular year and model of any given doll.
Everyone has their own reasons for being at BarbieCon: parents inheriting kids’ inventory, investors building retirement funds, nostalgics recapturing their childhood, being named Barbie or Ken and just rolling with it. But as the questions in the seminar made clear, the panelists were not the only experts. Here, everyone seemed an autodidact archivist at the small museums they stored in their homes.
Tarpley Hitt’s history of Barbie, Barbieland, is out next year
