Barbie is about a certain sign of femininity, of a certain ideal canonical bodily shape, and of certain signs of sexual allure: glitter, superficiality, decoration, passivity: as the ubiquitous object of a gaze, of an unattainable ideal. Unattainable since Barbie’s body is an anatomical disaster.
The relationship between fashion and the female body speaks about sexuality: it is not directly about the sexual, but flutters around the edges like a moth near a flame, like groupies around a star. Equally, it is not directly about sex but about diverse ideas or cultural constructions of sexuality.
The nature of this relationship is intrinsically ambiguous and slightly distanced. It makes the subject of fashion more interesting and offers vast possibilities for fashion items themselves; it is tantalising and elusive since it is firmly anchored in illusion.
In times past, the relationship was somewhat more direct. Let's consider the foot and the shoe. The Chinese lotus foot became a custom for women in the tenth century. It entailed bending and breaking the toes underneath the sole of the foot, which was bound tightly to keep this bulbous shape. The practice involved a very real physical trauma yet the suffering was regarded as the embodiment of a lofty cultural ideal, namely, to make the feet small enough so as “to dance on the image of a large lotus flower".1 In achieving such tiny feet, many rewards were deemed to follow, In particular, a large dowry. A woman was valued by the lure of her feet, as a fetish. The feet became “a pure object of love”; known as the “golden lily”, bound feet were considered to be more erotic than a woman's genitals... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Barbie is bound to reproduce the sign of the feminine, namely to be, not to do.
Figure 1 and Figure 2
