Barbie and Lammily
"Lammily is the forthcoming plastic doll whose motto is, "Average is beautiful." Her body shape is based on averages of data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control that is more often used to track the American obesity epidemic. She is not affiliated with Mattel's Barbie.
Last year, graphic designer Nickolay Lamm created some concept images of the "Normal Barbie" that became very popular around the Internet. (If you didn't see them, one is to the right.) Today Lamm is launching a project to put the design into production and make the dolls a reality. It's crowd-sourced, it "promotes realistic standards of beauty," and it can be under your holiday tree by late 2014 if enough people support the project.
Pictures at the link.
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What do you think of her? Is it important that your daughters and granddaughters play with fashion dolls that are proportionally correct as compared to Barbie dolls?
32 comments:
Why is she still blonde? Why not jet black or brown hair?
Fat girl dolls?
I'll ask my granddaughter for her opinion.
The one on the right is a lot sexier to me. Now we need George Costanza modeled Superman.
I always thought that Baby Dolls were cute little chubby babies. No grandmother ever tickled a baby under the chin and said "What a healthy skeletally baby!"
Chick, I'd say they're both blonde and dressed identically for direct comparison. There are more versions at the link.
These are known as fashion dolls, Trooper.
Lammily looks fine when I block Barbie. She looks chunky next to Barbie. What's wrong with me? Remember the end of the movie Chicago, with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellweger performing side by side? Zellweger is so tiny that Zeta-Jones looked like a cow. Which she's not. At all. It's crazy to think so, but there you have it. As long as we are inundated with images of skeletal women paraded as beauties, some of us will have skewed values of beauty even as we are aware of the distortion.
Christy, I had a similar experience when I watched (against my will) 15 minutes of the Kardashians. (If they were the three sisters I was watching, and not two with a visiting friend.) Two of them were tall and buxom, some would say overweight. The third was thin and short, but in comparison I thought she looked runty. I also thought that if two of them were thin and short, the larger one would look hulking.
Since it's obvious to a child that average is NOT beautiful, it follows that Lammily has fallen prey to the high self-esteem delusion.
What, no implants, tats, or duck lips?
Close but no cigar- the name should have been LEMMILY!
ricpic:
"Since it's obvious to a child that average is NOT beautiful, it follows that Lammily has fallen prey to the high self-esteem delusion."
I'm not sure what the group means when it says average is beautiful, but I think they're referencing realistic proportions. Barbie is disproportional compared to actual women. The Lammilies don't seem to have traditionally beautiful faces, but kinda cute, etc.
What average is, and whether it is beautiful is in the eye of the beholder.
I'm concerned the dolls aren't anatomically correct. I don't want little girls growing up thinking that people have smooth, hairless groins and having mommy parts and daddy parts are abnormal.
I'm stuck on the term "fashion doll". I'd not heard it used before and found the wiki def odd as it describes them as dolls primarily designed to be dressed to reflect fashion trends. They are manufactured both as toys for children to play with and as collectibles for adult collectors.
Maybe the term came into fashion with adult collectors. As the owner of a Revlon Doll and a Bubble head Barbie in the late 50's early 60's, my play with those two adult bodied dolls had little to do with current fashion reflection. Current cultural reflection maybe, but not fashion.
It mostly involved acting out stories, roll playing and grooming (fussing with hair styles and dressing them) in addition sewing some of their clothes. We did the same with our Troll Dolls, and most of their clothes were fashioned from Kleenex or felt.
With American Girl dolls available now and roles for women changing, I'm no longer clear as to what purpose "fashion dolls" serve and how little girls play with them these days. I'd need to know that before deciding how realistic or "normal" the body shapes need to be. My hunch is that play with then still has little to do with fashion trends and more to do with fantasy and imagination.
Do the same concerns for appropriate body image apply to male action figures? Or Hot Wheel cars?
They need a college freshman version that gains 25 pounds and wears sweatpants everywhere.
Ken would have a backwards ball cap, an Xbox, and a gut. And he'll never call back.
MamaM, my daughter is 25 and played with Barbies and American Girl exactly as you described.
"Lammily"? Based on the last name of the guy behind the project -- Lamm -- I guess. Anyway, weird sounding.
And isn't "crowd-sourced" just an updated version of design by committee? Which usually doesn't work very well.
Rest easy, DADvocate, Barbies have painted on underwear these days.
Paging Lisa Simpson...
Body image issues are not about Barbie, I promise. Now if you want to talk about 17 magazine and MTV, I'm all ears.
Or mothers who are constantly talking about how fat they are...
Role playing rather than roll, but some of that too. One of the SonM's memories of good times spent with cousins at the cottage involved sending Barbies for car rides down the long stair rail to see how far they could be launched. As the Aunt in charge of making matters right and stopping the sacrilege per the request of the constrenated doll owners, I was surprised to find the Barbies had not suited up for the game, with one wearing nothing but boots, which mattered not a whit to the miscreants doing the launching. The fun was in seeing how far they would go.
As for the Male Action Figure redo, mention of this was also made at the end of the article with a link to what the average man's body looks like, which totally puts the kibosh on fanciful ideas.
Anorexic women are unappealing. So I see this is a good thing.
I occasionally observe young girls with huge bellies pouring out over their too-tight clothes. As if they are proud of their obesity. The world has gone mad.
Lammily's much hotter.
I would never have sex with a toothpick. Maybe pick my teeth with one. That's what toothpicks are for.
And then there's Plus-size Barbie.
Painted on underwear? Sounds kinky. I like that.
GI Joe would want to get laid by Lammily.
Do the same concerns for appropriate body image apply to male action figures? Or Hot Wheel cars?
To some degree I think so. I'm not saying I care one way for Barbie or Lammily. But as a boy that played with Hot Wheels or Matchbox cars, I cared about proportional scale. In fact, I preferred Hot Wheels (always 1:64 scale) over Matchbox (1:64 to 1:100 scale). Matchbox might mean I could easily pack my Semi-Tractor in the same container as my Ferrari miniature, but when I played with them together, their disproportional sizes required more fantasy than I was interested in providing. With Hot Wheels, the Semi was bigger than the Ferrari, and so my fantasy was bit more grounded to some reality.
Did I mention I grew up to be an engineer?
As for GI Joe, they started off spending a great deal of research to make their toys from real world weaponry hardware. They then branched a bit into sci-fi, so that Cobra and Joe could be seen ahead of the common military (and also unlike the real military which was declining in popularity as people became war weary). This began a spiral of Hasbro engineers having to come up with more radical designs that were even more detached from reality. Fantasy combat didn't decline, but as boys were asked to accept a more sci-fi GI Joe as a realistic toy, they just transitioned to Transformers, where the Sci-Fi could be grounded by its own set rules for the Transformers universe. And that worked great until someone decided to develop Transformer Dinosaurs.
There are more versions at the link.
The brunette's hair looks unreal to me. It has the look of Commander Data. Also the poses and outfits remind me of Lilo from Lilo and Stitch, which I don't recall being a great marketing success while also trying to stress average/normal looks. Perhaps beachball playing Lammily should have sported a ponytail, as most sports playing girls would. Also, can Lammily wear heals?
My daughters are grown now. They were never much into dolls. But from a fantasy play, lammily looks like a younger girl. Actually within about 5 years of the age of a girl who might play with her. Both GI Joe and Barbie allowed children to fantasy about adult situations (sometimes even those adult situations, but that's not exactly what I meant). The way they seem to be marketing Lammily so far, she's a doll that you can imagine playing with in scenarios that the girl could just step outside and experience for herself without the fantasy. What's the point of it?
" Both GI Joe and Barbie allowed children to fantasy about adult situations (sometimes even those adult situations, but that's not exactly what I meant). The way they seem to be marketing Lammily so far, she's a doll that you can imagine playing with in scenarios that the girl could just step outside and experience for herself without the fantasy. What's the point of it?"
Great points, Leland. In the middle of the discussion, I remembered my Seventies-era Barbie, and got her out, and also the one (Nineties-era) Barbie of my daughter's I'd saved. Mine had smaller breasts, a thicker waist, and like Lammily, is about half a head shorter. The main similarity is the long neck, which on my old Barbie is proportionally too long and thin, compared to Lammily.
Yes, they are about fantasy, and I do see your point about the adult look, but how far is correct, proportionally, comparing my Barbie to my daughter's?
I hope Lammily's heels flex to accommodate high heels, or it's all for naught :)
My daughter used to call GI Joes 'boy Barbies.'
That's good to know DAD. I was picturing you with modified Kens and Barbies :)
I hope Lammily's heels flex to accommodate high heels, or it's all for naught :)
Honestly, the high heel thing was exactly what I was thinking. In all the poses, Lammily is wearing flats and dressed in business casual. While that's common for many women NWWT, there are few people who fantasize about being common.
The good news is they can fix most of that by just providing fancier clothing. And if the foot doesn't currently fit high heels, it should be a simple adjustment to the mold to fix it. I think if Lammily can't sport an elegant dress, she'll be a marketing flop.
Leland, looking at the article, the pic in the orange dress, I see she can wear heels because her ankles are swivel-y. Which makes me think of the teeny feet of Barbie, compared to how tall she would be in real life.
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