Meet Ken: He is a beefy Asian man with 20/40 vision who frequently works out of doors.
And, meet Ken: He is a young record executive who expresses himself through bold sneaker attire while simultaneously being an African-American man of average build.
And, meet Ken: Against the better angels of his nature, he has bleached his hair peroxide blond, and now is determined to travel on an airplane in comfort and style.
And, meet Ken: He has a man bun, and that’s his whole thing.
In a condition of affairs at worst disastrous, at best depraved, Ken, Ken, Ken, and Ken are all dating the same woman.
Her name is Barbie.
When he debuted in 1961, Ken (legal name: Ken Carson) was a spindly, anemic fan of casual swimwear. Over the years, he has blossomed into a sculpted, perma-tanned icon of American masculinity. Even if you never played with Ken, his tiny footfall has reverberated through your life; he charges in early in the formative years of the fairer sex, setting an impossible standard for males against which you will be judged forever. Ken is the first man—or, technically, eunuch—many little girls will ever see nude. Consequently, he teaches young ladies that men are meant to have bodies like Olympic water-polo players. He’ll teach girls precisely how much taller than women men should be and (sort of) about the different ways men use the bathroom; Barbie’s Dreamhouse, a one-woman mega-mansion, features a single but quintessential nod to Ken’s existence: a toilet seat that lifts up. “That’s very important for Ken from a girl’s perspective,” says Michael Shore, Mattel’s head of global consumer insights (it means he watches kids play with dolls). “Because guys use toilets different from girls.”
Over time, Ken has been depicted as a rapping rocker (Rappin’ Rockin’ Ken), a doctor (Dr. Ken), and a sovereign of the Crystal Caves (King of the Crystal Caves Ken), but that is what he is reduced to: someone who uses the toilet in a mysterious way.
That’s because Ken is the carefully calibrated ideal complement to Barbie—a blank, smiling man who does not threaten the stardom of the most intelligent, talented, rappin’ rockin’ princess astronaut in all of Malibu. Ken is “nice,” the members of the Barbie team will tell me over and over when I ask them to describe a doll’s personality: “a nice guy”; “a solid dude”; and, most damningly: “I picture him kind of Ryan Seacrest-y.”
Well, not anymore. Starting now, Mattel is re-imagining the all-American guy. He may not be as inspiring as an imaginary female solo homeowner or the first imaginary female president, but that doesn’t mean he can’t have a rich imaginary inner life. The decision to give him some depth marks a new chapter for men, and dolls who are men. From this day forward, Ken doesn’t always have to look like the most basic frat bro ever to get a B- in econ. He can be complicated, mysterious—maybe even vegan. No more Mr. Nice Ken. (Actually, he’ll still be very, very nice. “We want to make sure Ken reflects a friendly view of the world,” says Shore.)
One way to make Ken more of a real-live man, Mattel decided, is to put him through a dramatic physical transformation. And so, on the pink stiletto heels of last year’s announcement that Barbie would henceforth be available in taller, shorter, and, most sensationally, curvier versions, the company is adding two new Ken shapes to its roster and manufacturing them in a larger array of skin shades and hairstyles. There will be an “original”-size Ken with cornrows. A “slim” Ken with a fade. A mixed-race Ken with a man bun. Asian Kens. Latino Kens. A pale white Ken and a tan white Ken. A Ken who is wearing a watch. A Ken who is…“broad.”
And these are all the “real” Ken. Not friends of Ken, like the already extant Brad and Steven and commemorative-edition Batman doll “sculpted in the likeness of Ben Affleck.” Just Ken.
This branding is a radical attempt to alter kids’ psyches. Mattel has spent the better part of six decades teaching children that Barbie and Ken are white; that Barbie and Ken are sculpted like Hellenistic statues, only pornier, despite lacking genitals; that Barbie and Ken have friends—that some of their best imaginary friends are black—but that at the end of the day those friends are not quite A-list superstars like Barbie and Ken. But a few years ago, sales started to tumble. Millennial moms declared Barbie out of sync with their values. Suddenly incentivized to embrace au courant inclusivity, the toymaker had two choices: upend the entire Barbie universe by promoting all her friends to equal status or keep Barbie and Ken at the center of it and just make everyone—regardless of race, shape, or hairstyle—Barbie and Ken.
Think of this strategy as the ice-cream-ization of Barbie. There are an infinite number of flavors, but we refer to them all by the same general name; “ice cream” isn’t necessarily vanilla—and neither is Barbie’s boyfriend.
It’s an intriguing idea, nestled in a snake pit of complications. What about the modern man necessitates a Ken do-over? What are men—and Ken—for in 2017? How does a corporation select the shades of brown it will use to represent black people? Who decides how fat a fat Ken can be?
Mattel was willing to entertain my questions, asked with a Barbie’s confidence, but it wasn’t about to send me unreleased dolls in the mail. I had to go to the company headquarters if I wanted a look at these new Kens. And so, borne by the promise that I could spend a few minutes studying the prototypes as long as I did not photograph them nude, I set off for Ken’s native land: California, near the airport.
The Mattel design center, in El Segundo, California, is sort of like the Pentagon, except it’s very difficult to get into. In addition to submitting a government ID for electronic scanning and wearing a prominently displayed visitor’s badge for the duration of their time on site, guests must sign an NDA at the reception area. The design center is where the company’s ultra-confidential toy prototypes are invented before being discreetly sent abroad for manufacturing. It is Mattel’s version of the Wonka factory, and, accordingly, every outsider is treated with suspicion.
Behind the security desk is a floor-to-ceiling photo, blown up several hundred percent, of Ruth and Elliot Handler, the deceased toy-making couple who co-founded Mattel. These two are everywhere in the design center—and this photo in particular forces a doll’s terrifying perspective on visitors. A biographical exhibit in the waiting area explains that the Handlers met as teenagers at a B’nai B’rith dance in 1929; because Barbie and Ken are named for their children (Barbara and Kenneth), one could extrapolate that Barbie and Ken are, in fact, Jewish. One could also casually make this observation to an employee at Mattel and then, a week later, find oneself the recipient of a polite e-mail stating emphatically that “Barbie has never had a religion.” So perhaps it is better to simply know in one’s heart that Barbie is Jewish and say nothing.
From the waiting area, I am escorted to a blazing pink conference room, where I learn that, as with Barbie’s religion, the offcial company position is that Ken has no age—and also that he is roughly 18, even though he has held many adult jobs. He is perpetually dating Barbie but, despite their many nuptial ceremonies, has never married her. (Per Mattel, all of Ken and Barbie’s weddings are “dream” weddings.) Ken has no children but has been sold alongside a toddler “sibling” for whom he is the only apparent caretaker. But the quiet tragedy of Ken’s life as the perfect man? Boys—even boys who like Barbie—don’t care about him.
That, though, was never the point of Ken.
“In the past,” says Michael Shore, “Ken was really viewed as more of an accessory in Barbie’s world, to support the narrative of whatever was happening with the girls.” Ken was arm candy, a proponent of Barbie’s endeavors, a complement at a ratio of about 1:7. Or at least that’s how sales worked over the years—kids own one Ken for every seven Barbies. That’s part of what the initiative hopes to change. Mattel must convince little girls, and the adults who rule them, that men are fascinating, too. At least enough to get that number closer to two Kens for every seven Barbies. Men—and Ken—aren’t just Seacrests, after all; they come in all shades and shapes (and innovative fashions). Sometimes they are also worthy of attention.
In order to understand what toy men walk around doing all day, Mattel spends huge amounts of time and money analyzing “play patterns”—consistent ways boys and girls interact with Mattel products. These “play patterns” often take the form of standard serial-killer-type behavior: stripping Barbie and Ken naked, styling and re-styling Barbie’s hair. Storytelling, in which the dolls are used to act out scenarios, is the most popular. It’s also where Ken shines. Although he was invented specifically as a “boyfriend” doll for Barbie (herself modeled after a sexy figurine marketed to German adults in the 1950s), Ken’s job description in 2017 has broadened tremendously: His purpose now is to represent all the possible male characters conceivable in the universe.
“When kids are really young,” says Shore—in Barbie terms, really young means about 3 years old—“a lot of [storytelling] is about understanding the world around them. So it’s ‘house play.’ ”Often, “house play” is set in the bathroom, where Ken gets his special toilet seat. It’s also why since the ’70s, Mattel has released eight Kens with some form of disappear-able and re-appear-able facial hair; they are perennially among the most popular Kens.
“You see Barbie and Ken representing a lot of the people in the kids’ lives,” says Shore. “Barbie could be ‘sister,’ and Ken could be ‘brother.’ Of course, ‘mom’/‘dad,’ ‘mom’/‘uncle,’ ‘mom’/‘friend,’ ‘dad’/‘friend.’ ”
But just because Uncle-Friend Ken lives with Mom Barbie doesn’t mean he’s having sex with her. Kids generally don’t start imagining Barbie and Ken in romantic dating scenarios until around second grade. And in recent years, Mattel has begun repositioning Ken as more of a friend than a pure love interest. (The subtext of Ken being “trustworthy” and “nice” seems to be: Ken would never sexually assault Barbie. He just wants to enjoy her company on her own terms, visit her at her mansion if that’s what she wants.)
“We always joke that Ken comes with three essentials,” says Bill Greening, a principal designer at Mattel. Greening has worked at the brand for nearly 20 years and collects dolls on the side. Possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of Kens, he is literally living his Barbie Dream Job. “Your tuxedo, your swimsuit, and of course he’s a prince. Those [were] his three big roles in Barbie’s world.”
But if Barbie’s list of career fields becomes more gender-neutral (engineering, architecture), there’s no reason for her friend Ken to be just a prince. And so along with a “spy” and a “video-game hero,” it becomes plausible for him to be, like Barbie, one of the Fashionistas™ (the line in which the new Kens will make their debut).
The diversity push has similarly lucrative goals. As Ken’s physical form changes to better reflect the increasingly multicultural world American kids inhabit, the hope is that he will become a more relevant (and important-to-purchase) character in kids’ stories.
All those aspects combine to make Ken the Platonic ideal of a 2017 male: friendly; well-groomed; variant of skin color, hairstyle, and body shape; unthreatened by his female companion’s success; and unapologetic in his study of fashion. He is straight or maybe gay or otherwise so far advanced tolerance-wise that the distinguishing features about him aren’t even worth noting—they just are. Ken’s doll paradise is an ideal society where all citizens suffer from communal prosopagnosia, never able to tell, in a given moment, if they’re talking to Broad Ken, or Slim Ken, or Original. Ken’s identity, like the box that contains him, is post-label.
In a dark corner of the design center, in a lightless cubby located in a small honeycomb of identical lightless cubbies, sits a being who is God to the Kens: Ray. Ray is Ray Cavalluzzi, the digital sculptor who brings Kens forth into this unholy world—a tremorless man tasked with translating hopes into plastic. Without Cavalluzzi, designers’ visions would remain just that: ephemeral pictures, collections of adjectives, mood boards laden with computer printouts of guys in color-blocked tank tops. Ray can make any Ken and every Ken, the Kens of Americans’ dreams—and some they have only seen in nightmares. His workspace is cluttered with amputated doll limbs.
“They’re all over the place,” he says, brushing aside a pile of exiguous men’s legs. “Like a crab dinner.”
Cavalluzzi’s computer screen glows with an image of three sexy men stripped down to their cyan blue computer-modeled skin. In the middle is Original Ken: 12 inches tall, with abs so hard they could cut dream diamonds for imaginary engagement rings. Next to him, Slim Ken, who is shorter, looks almost boyish, his arms and thighs lacking a gym rat’s definition, his stomach flat and ridgeless. Plonked down on the left is Broad Ken. Broad Ken is more filled out than Original Ken, his torso remaining blockish where Original’s goes concave. His shoulders and thighs are wider, too—though all Kens must be manufactured with a preposterous-looking thigh gap to make it easy for their trousers to come off and on. (Their groins are flat because the way fabric bunches at a 12-inch scale would make even the faintest hint of a phallus seem extra-prominent.)
I’ll just come out and say it: Broad Ken is a little disappointing. Curvy Barbie carries her weight the same way a curvy woman would: in ample hips that softly bulge around her flesh-colored underwear, and in an ass that just won’t quit. Broad Ken doesn’t have a six-pack, but he does have pecs, and abs with light definition—a far cry from the potbellied “Dadbod Ken” many commentators proposed when Mattel unveiled the re-proportioned Barbies last January.
“Originally,” says Ray, “I made him paunchy. I gave him a nice healthy gut. So he was the post-holiday Ken.” Ray picks up a haptic stylus attached to a small machine on his desk and begins drawing invisibly in the air. The machine creates its own resistance based on the 3-D image on Ray’s screen, enabling him literally to feel the digital clay.
“It was a matter of finding a balance,” he says. As Ray’s wand glides through the empty air in front of him, muscles bloom under Broad Ken’s on-screen skin. “You don’t want to go too much.”
For the Barbie team, creating a perfectly executed regular body is a Sisyphean mission. The decision to alter the dolls’ appearance stems from a general broadening of American beauty standards, as loving yourself has been transformed from a consolation prize into an aspirational behavior. The complicating factor for Ken is that those standards have broadened more in regard to women, possibly because men already had more leeway with their appearance. According to a 1996 study, the odds of meeting a man with Ken’s idealized shape were about 1 in 50. The odds of meeting a woman with Barbie’s: less than 1 in 100,000. Make the original pencil-thin Barbie closer to the shape of the average American woman (“curvy”) and the effects are dramatic. To achieve the same drastic visual impact with Ken, designers would have had to make his body much, much larger. But make Ken too big and critics would argue that he looks unhealthy. Keep him too trim and he’s unattainable.
And what could you even call him?
“With Barbie [it was] clear what was offensive with the curvier doll versus what wasn’t,” says Michelle Chidoni, a polished, deftly amiable executive from the global brand communications department. We are sitting in a capacious conference room surrounded by Barbies in fashions so cutting-edge that to describe them would be illegal. But I will reveal to the reader that a great multitude of the outfits are both fabulous and fun. “People [in focus groups] didn’t want to be called ‘plus-size.’ ‘Curvy’ was the clear winner. [But] where ‘curvy’ in the female world of fashion has become something that’s desirable and sexy and positive, the men’s fashion world has not gone there yet.”
Mattel’s constant aim when describing body types is to unearth a marketing term with “a neutral-to-positive association.” They don’t always find it on the first try. Or second. Or third. Initially, in their attempt to recapture the proud spirit of “curvy” for a male doll, the Barbie team borrowed a word from the boys’ clothing industry: “husky.” Focus-group reactions were disastrous.
“‘Husky’ just turned off every guy we talked to,” says Chidoni, shaking her head. “A lot were really traumatized by that—as a child, shopping in a husky section.” “Athletic” was rejected on the notion that athletes can have vastly different body types. “Brawny” didn’t fare much better. And so: “broad.”
But for all the adjective agita, a customer walking through the toy aisle at Target won’t even see “broad” (or “slim,” or “original”) on the dolls’ packaging; there will be nothing to signify that the dolls are different sizes, except, of course, the dolls themselves. These terms were developed expressly for Mattel’s announcement and to facilitate online shopping. Also not listed anywhere on the packaging: the doll’s race.
Now that we are a nation of woke baes and Trump supporters, it may feel like Barbie waited too long (or way, way too long) to make a concerted effort at diversity. Recall, however, that the predominantly white brand has fallen out of favor only recently. Until a couple years ago, Barbie’s sales had been on a general incline since her debut in 1959 to an 85 percent white United States. On a grand scale, the revamp is occurring on schedule: More than half of American children are expected to be part of a minority race or ethnic group by 2020, according to the Census Bureau. Mattel is changing its standard depiction of the all-American male just as it becomes fiscally wise to do so: as America tips over into a country of Dad-Neighbor-Boyfriends who are ambiguously diverse in race, trade, and fashion. Whatever this is—the dream of the enlightened man or perhaps even just the dream of a man who seems Brazilian—isn’t such a bad thing to propagate.
To watch the designers responsible for giving Ken faces (and races) at work, I am escorted (by no less than four people—all of whom could outrun me should I make a break for the secret room where Mattel shrinks down human women to Barbie sizes) to the largest area in the design center, a vast utilitarian atelier lit with a combination of skylights and fluorescent tubes and divided into a maze of cubicles and open-air worktables. One such table is laden with metal stands, on which several dozen decapitated doll heads of various shapes, expressions, colors, and hairstyles are impaled on spikes—an admonitory display of contemptible traitors from Tudor England’s hottest town.
Ken’s body is made of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene plastic—the same sturdy material on the inside of most refrigerators. The new crop of Kens will feature seven new skin tones (plus nine hairstyles and heads—“face sculpts” in company jargon). If a 3-year-old girl has a biracial black and Latino father, Mattel wants to make it easier for her (or her parents) to find and purchase a corresponding Ken. But “biracial black and Latino” can manifest itself in humans in innumerable shades and is just one possible racial combination.
“The colors aren’t designed for each specific doll,” Barbie design VP Kim Culmone tells me in her once when I ask how her team determines which seven skin shades are worthy of a global audience. (Since 1982, Mattel has periodically released non-white versions of some existent Kens, but the company would not say which.) “They’re almost designed like a painting palette. So rather than saying, ‘This doll is Asian and now I’m picking his skin tone,’ it’s making sure we have a variety of light skin tones that cast a little bit yellow. Some that may cast a little pinker. Then moving to mid-range and going all the way into dark.”
Skin color, of course, is just one indicator of racial phenotype. There’s also hair. Face shape. Nose and eyes and lips. Because it is cheaper and easier to form into intricate short hairstyles, like cornrows, the new Kens all have molded hair—hair patterns cut directly into the plastic of their head and painted—rather than the shiny plastic fibers that Barbie swings around so luxuriously. (Barbie’s hair is made of the same stuff as Saran Wrap.) Although Ken’s hollow head is rotocast as a single piece of plastic, hair and face sculpts can be paired up and switched around in any combination.
“For an African-American face sculpt,” designer Bill Greening explains, “the nose is flatter, wider. But we’ve done more blended races. So even if you have, say, an African-American-shaped nose, we might do it in a Caucasian skin tone because we know that there are mixed races. You definitely still have blond-haired, blue-eyed Ken, and you still have an African-American Ken, but there are some that could be: Is he Latino? Is he Middle Eastern?”
“[Some of the Fashionista Kens] are a little bit ethnically ambiguous, and that’s kind of the point,” says Chidoni. “The paint is where you get the shape of the eyes and the shape of the lips, so that really denotes racial cues as well. You could have an Original Ken sculpt and paint it differently and get a really different look.”
The goals of Mattel’s new Ken exercise are lofty—even if they stem from the adult play pattern of increasing profit margins. It’s hard not to feel hopeful about the effects on kids’ self-esteem if instead of being taught from an early age that people who look like them are less important, the message is that they, too, are good enough to be the main attraction. (For the same reason, Fashionista Barbie and Ken retail for the same price—so neither is more valuable than the other.) But even now, there are limits to Mattel’s willingness to impose diversity. A major sticking point is non-doll Barbie content like videos and books, in which Ken and Barbie will continue to be depicted as what the company calls “the iconic characters”—meaning the svelte blond, blue-eyed versions. This would appear to undercut much of the work done by calling everyone, of every shape and color, “Barbie” or “Ken” in doll form. It will certainly test the limits of 3-year-olds’ abilities to comprehend the Barbie multiverse hypothesis.
Fundamentally, dolls are for kids who know very little about society—its norms and its flaws. And so it’s certainly possible that the tangibles—the skin pigments, the love handles, the vicious debate surrounding packaging-appropriate marketing terms—matter more to parents than to children, who are already making an insane logical leap by pretending a tiny man with plastic hair is engaged in a fulfilling romantic relationship with a partially topless mermaid. In the long run, Fashionista Kens may be most valuable in their function as time capsules, preserving in plastic amber not just clothing and beauty ideals but also what’s important to this generation of American parents: rejecting elitism, embracing a wider variety of races and body types, putting one’s hair in a cool bun. Mattel knows that, ultimately, it doesn’t matter if children are content to play God with any small humanoid figure; they’re designing kids’ toys for adults. Adults are the ones with credit cards, after all. You’ve got to give them what they want. And what is that in the United States of 2017? A thickset myopic Asian Ken.
Caity Weaver is a GQ writer and editor.
This story originally appeared in the July 2017 issue with the title “Yes, We Ken.”
