Mattel Barbie Tennis Champion

Product Information

Barbie® honors Naomi Osaka, record-breaking professional tennis player and champion for change, as a Barbie® Role Model. King, who narrowly missed being in the target demographic when Barbie debuted, said she grew up with “dolls in one corner of the bedroom,” while the other corner held “bats, mitts, and then eventually tennis stuff.” Rather than rejecting the fashion component of Barbie, King said she embraces it as a student of history. Tennis Coach Barbie, I realize, can’t model particularly good technique. Though she can spread her legs, her knees cannot bend. Her left arm is rigidly straight; her right elbow is bent at an acute angle. A tennis swing would require an arm to achieve both, but not just one or the other. Her racquet holding is not particularly textbook, either: Her racquet comes with a helpful handle attachment, but she can only hold it so the face is close to parallel to the ground. The bag accessory, however, scores points—the racquet slides in smoothly, and its strap rests nicely in her bent elbow. She looks much more comfortable with a handbag than a forehand. But as Mattel’s online game taught me, the point is for Barbie to be dressed for tennis, not to actually play tennis. I’m reminded of one of King’s catchphrases: “You have to see it to be it.” Well, with Tennis Coach Barbie, at least there’s a visual.

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. 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.”When Trixie Mattel, a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race , walked the runway of the reality competition show’s main stage in the season 7 premiere, she wore a bodysuit that emulated the hinges of a naked Barbie doll, to show off her life-in-plastic-it’s-fantastic aesthetic, modeled after the doll’s exaggerated femininity. She accessorized her “nude illusion” look with a pink visor, and held in her right hand the archetypal Barbie accessory: a pink tennis racquet.

But as I move her more, and bend the knees, I realize that with gain in function comes a significant loss of form. Knees that can bend, it turns out, are pretty darn ugly-looking. Tennis Coach Barbie’s legs didn’t work, really, but they were considerably nicer-looking.This collectible Barbie® doll is sculpted to Naomi's likeness and features flexibility for endless posing possibilities. Tennis has been a pillar of Barbie’s world since her formative years—the first tennis outfits and accessories for Barbie hit the shelves in 1962, just three years after Barbie debuted in 1959. Tennis has been a Barbie mainstay ever since, with her countless outfits evolving alongside on-court trends from preppy whites to brightly colored synthetic fabrics.