And then we weren’t
Writing about Barbie last week reminded me of something else I wrote about Barbie long ago. And by long ago I mean 2006. So, of course I decided I needed to find this essay/article from 2006 in the digital dumpster of my computer, then I couldn’t resist doing a quick edit, even though there’s nothing to do with it, really…
So I thought I’d share the essay with you if you want to check it out at the end of this letter. 2006-Barrington titled it,“How Barbie Lost Her Cool, Her Boyfriend and Her Marketshare and Some Stuff I’ve Thought About That,” because that’s how she rolled. 2024-Barrington edited that down to “How Barbie Lost Her Cool.” *
In the essay, I talk about when I worked for Mattel in the late 1990s, which is a trip down memory late.
But since I wrote it in 2006, the essay itself is a trip down memory lane…and also a trip, in the trippy sense of the word. It documents a now-forgotten blip of time in the early aughts during which Barbie and Ken broke up and Barbie fought a crisis of identity by rebounding with an Australian hunk named Blaine… and it does so through the lens of someone writing in 2006—complete with mentions of “the brave new digital world” and “information that spreads like a virus” and “Ben Affleck during his Jennifer Lopez phase.”
For context, 2006 was the last year before Facebook opened to the general public.
We did we not know what was coming.
For more context, one reason this article has lain dormant for eternity is that when it was first accepted for publication, the journal that wanted it was online only. I asked a professor what to do, and he advised me not to publish online, because only print would have cache.**
Again, we did not know what was coming.
But, J-Lo and Ben are back together, Barbie is cool again, Substack is the new blog, so maybe an old essay can still live on the internet.
xo
B
* P.S. Same essay link at the end instead of the middle.
** P.P.S. To be clear, this was a wonderful professor, and it is in no way his fault that after one rejection from a ridiculously-out-of-reach prestigious magazine, I apparently thought “Welp, that’s it then,” and left the article in a folder for the next fifteen years.