WTA player Barbora Strycova, who wore the dress and “loved the colors,” said she grew up getting Barbies for Christmas each year, and said she could see the doll’s essence represented on the tour.

My G.I. Joe was one rough, tough hombre; so rough, in fact, that one day he beat up my eleven-year-old older sister’s Ken doll and absconded with Barbie,” wrote author Steven Hill in the collection of essays Male Lust: Pleasure, Power, and Transformation . “My G.I. Joe carried off Barbie like a prized Helen of Troy. She was [G.I. Joe’s] prize for besting that wimp Ken, who could hardly defend the beautiful Barbie with only his tennis racquet, dressed in those limy green Bermuda shorts.” Naomi Osaka Barbie® doll makes a great gift for collectors, tennis fans and kids ages 6 years old and up. Doll stand and Certificate of Authenticity included.

Eugenie Bouchard faces Danielle Collins in the first round of the qualifiers for the Canadian Open 2023

I think the tent has gotten bigger, and it’s probably gotten bigger because I don’t think corporations ever do anything that is not in their financial interest,” Lord told me. “Probably mothers remember the historic match with Bobby Riggs—or don’t even remember, because they were not alive. The doll’s identity is very fluid now, and I think when people deride things as being Barbie-like, they’re thinking of the original doll, not necessarily what the thing is today.” She was also called a "goddess" by one of her supporters which followed a similar theme in her comments section. In 2019, the classic tennis brand Sergio Tacchini made a pink, blue, and yellow tennis dress for its women’s players, inspired by the Totally Hair Barbie from 1992, to commemorate the doll’s 60th birthday. A Barbie doll wearing the Sergio Tacchini dress was also sold at the 2019 Italian Open. Naomi Osaka Barbie® doll is ready to hit the court in a Nike tennis dress with brushstroke print, inspired by a look she sported at a major match in 2020.

Barbie® honors Naomi Osaka, record-breaking professional tennis player and champion for change, as a Barbie® Role Model. Though Ryan designed Barbie, the concept came from Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler. Handler was traveling through Europe with her kids when she came across a German Bild Lilli doll, who was anything but kid-friendly: Lilli was a high-class call girl who began her life as a comic and was sold in smoke shops and adult toy stores. But Handler—who had mentioned the idea of an adult doll to her Mattel exec husband before—liked what she saw. Her husband Elliot had initially balked at the idea, but the Lilli dolls sold him on the concept. Billie Jean King admitted she hesitated when approached by Mattel about making her into a Barbie, but was impressed after doing “some homework” on the doll’s history, and was further impressed to hear that her doll would be launched alongside Ella Fitzgerald and Florence Nightingale dolls. “I love Ruth Handler, how she thought about why she did it,” King told me. “She did it for independence, for girls to imagine that they could be anything. So that’s the reason I did it, because of her philosophy.”Though feminists of King’s generation might consider the notion of a Billie Jean King Barbie oxymoronic, Lord believes that its inclusion reflects Mattel’s reading of the current day, as they always have strived to do.

Billie Jean King Barbie is also considerably more muscular-looking than the other Barbies. She’s got real biceps, visible calves and quads—again, more accurately personifying the actual Billie Jean King than Stone. Barbie was like no doll before her. Created by Ruth Handler, Barbie was named after Handler’s daughter and anatomically modeled after the German doll Bild Lilli, who was a sort of pinup totem marketed toward male readers of the racy tabloid Bild. Handler’s breakthrough was that a doll could represent an anatomically adult woman and be played with by girls who would see and imagine their possible adulthoods through the doll, rather than the previous dolls for children which represented babies and other young children that were designed to nurture a young girl’s maternal instincts.Just as Barbie has engaged with tennis, so too have tennis manufacturers engaged with Barbie. In 2005, Head launched a series of pink children’s racquets with Barbie branding for the 2005 holiday season. Barbie can also happily go downscale, however. M.G. Lord, the author of Forever Barbie , wrote that “Americans often argue that this country has infinite class mobility, which is, of course, hyperbolic—for everyone except Barbie. Barbie can not only ascend the social ladder, she can occupy several classes at once.”