Irons every piece of clothing he owns. This Ken was heartbroken when Jersey Shore went off the air. He takes more time on his hair than you do. He may not own anything that has sleeves. You met him at the Crossfit class you had a Groupon for. His Insta is all sunsets and blurry videos of crowd scenes at the club. Skips leg day. His shirt says "Meet me at the co-op! Is literally always wearing that vest. It might be a DeRay McKesson thing. You're not sure.
Is also literally gorgeous. Like, to an uncomfortable degree. He's a lawyer, you think. It's hard to remember anything but the jawline. And the vest. He makes his own hair products based on research he does on the African diaspora. That's his hobby. He would very much like to tell you about the summer he spent abroad in college. As a person he's the embodiment of the second season of Master of None.
This isn't a read. He texts back right away. You only get to see this Ken once every couple of months because he's playing Philip Schuyler in the touring production of Hamilton. He introduced you to his grandmother on your second date. When he told you his aspiration in life was to have his own sitcom you thought he was joking.
Now you're not so sure. He's so fascinating. Sometimes you text him "Sup? Is always down for karaoke. Name: Ken! Job: Influencer. You met this Ken on the plane back from the Fyre Festival. You shared a cheese sandwich as he extolled the virtues of the Chainsmokers.
He has 1. His own? He's always inviting you to swank openings of galleries and nightclubs on Tuesday nights. But you never go because they all start at 2 a. Greenwich Mean Time and you have no idea how to interpret that. This Ken was despondent when JackThreads went out of business. He is always wearing those Timbs and you're not sure if it's fashion or because he works in construction. He says he works in construction but you're actually not sure because he has the cleanest, neatest fingernails you've ever seen.
The diversity push has similarly lucrative goals. 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. His workspace is cluttered with amputated doll limbs. In the middle is Original Ken: 12 inches tall, with abs so hard they could cut dream diamonds for imaginary engagement rings. Plonked down on the left is Broad Ken. 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 inch scale would make even the faintest hint of a phallus seem extra-prominent. I gave him a nice healthy gut. So he was the post-holiday Ken. For the Barbie team, creating a perfectly executed regular body is a Sisyphean mission.
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.
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. 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. Or second. Or third. 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. 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 , 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.
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. 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.
Since , Mattel has periodically released non-white versions of some existent Kens, but the company would not say which. Some that may cast a little pinker.
Then moving to mid-range and going all the way into dark. Though less research has been done on Ken dolls specifically, studies have shown that playing with Barbies with unrealistic body shapes can negatively affect children's body image. In a study , researchers noted that while Barbie's newer "curvy," "tall" and "petite" dolls "are more diverse than the original doll, they remain unrepresentative of the diversity of female body shapes. Best says Ken is "making strides on his own" but that both Ken and Barbie are "definitely continuing to evolve and grow.
On its page about the "power of representation," the website echoes this commitment to growth: "We're not done yet. Facebook Twitter Email. Show Caption. Hide Caption. Barbie's beau, Ken, celebrates 60 years on shelves.
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