Despite the design of the Barbie doll’s foot evolving over the years, her association with the impossible arch has endured.

The Barbie doll has long been associated with her characteristic arched feet, a design feature present since her initial release in 1959. Barbie's creator, Ruth Handler, was inspired by the German Bild Lili doll, which also featured an arched foot meant for high-heeled shoes. This design choice limited Barbie's footwear options to primarily high heels for many years.

The arch of Barbie's foot has roots in the fashion standards of previous decades, including the 1920s and 1950s, where women in beauty contests and popular culture often stood on their tiptoes to emulate the look of wearing heels, even while barefoot. Photographs from that era, including images of celebrities like Liz Taylor, demonstrate the enduring association of the arched foot with femininity and desirability.

As Barbie evolved to represent a variety of careers in the early 1960s, her footwear remained largely unchanged. It is suggested that economic considerations, such as the cost of changing manufacturing molds, and social perceptions of femininity played roles in maintaining Barbie's high-heeled design. The continuation of the arched foot symbolized the coexistence of femininity and career ambition.

In 2015, Mattel introduced Barbie dolls with flat feet, allowing for more diverse footwear options. Despite these changes, the image of Barbie with arched feet remains central to her identity. The significance of footwear is further highlighted in popular media portrayals, drawing attention to the social implications and expectations related to women's fashion choices.



Why does it matter that Barbie is on her tiptoes?

The Barbie movie sparked a lot of conversation, often about one thing in particular. The iconic shot of the arched foot. Iconic Barbie foot shot. Did you get a special pedicure? What on earth is happening? The moment when she steps out of her shoes and maintains her Barbie foot was fantastic. This scene, which has inspired imitations on social media, highlights the doll's arched feet, a design detail since Barbie was first released in 1959. Ruth Handler, Barbie's creator, was inspired by a German doll called Bild Lili, which was intended as an adult gift and based on a popular risque cartoon. Lili doll was influenced by that Varga look, and she was the image of female desirability, but she also had a little bit of an edge to her. Barbie's small and so petite, her clothes and figure look so neat. Mattel decided that they wanted to buy the rights to the doll, bring it to America, and transform it, very little, by the way, into a doll appropriate for little girls. The Barbie design also emulated Lili's footwear, a pair of black high-heeled shoes. When the shoe came off, the foot had that sort of a beautiful arch to it, but it also limited the types of shoes that could be put onto this Barbie, so it was basically high heels or nothing. That arched foot has a long tradition, actually. So even if you go back and look at the 1920s, if you look at beauty contests of women in bathing suits, but they're wearing shoes that aren't even necessarily for the beach. These photos from the 1950s show women in the US in bathing suits maintaining that arch, even without high heels on. One of the most famous is an image of Liz Taylor in her bathing suit poolside, and this is replicated over and over and over again, even in home photographs. I've likened this to them wearing a ghost heel. By standing on their tiptoes, they're connecting to that vocabulary of fashionability and desirability that was so central to the look of femininity in the 1950s. By the early 1960s, Barbie had become a career girl. She could now be a nurse, a flight attendant, or a fashion designer, but her footwear options remained limited. I think that there were two reasons why she continued to wear high heels. One is it costs a lot of money to change the mold of a mass-produced item, and so keeping her as a high-heel-wearing figure probably had economic purpose. But the other, I think that as women were themselves, in reality, trying to expand the realms in which they could participate, there were huge concerns that if a woman became a doctor or a woman went to outer space, that she would cease to be a woman. And the high heel was a way of reaffirming that you can be both an attractive, desirable woman and you can have a career. We can work from 9 to 5, and then change in a sec for an evening with kids. As women's styles evolved, so did the design of Barbie's feet. Suddenly Barbie's moving, like you move. Mattel officially introduced dolls that could wear flat shoes in 2015. Even as Barbie's foot was allowed to change, I still think that the iconic Barbie maintains a foot that requires a high heel. In the trailer, Barbie's destiny seems to lie in her choice of footwear. You can go back to your regular life, or you can know the truth about the universe. The choice is now yours. The first one, the high heel. You have to want to know. Okay? Do it again. I think that contrast says quite a bit. Birkenstocks in particular are historically linked to feminism, and they are the quintessential sensible shoe. The term sensible shoe has long been used to deride women who are not interested in pursuing an eroticized display of self. My heels are on the ground. Flat feet! The centrality of footwear and the centrality of her foot, be it in an arched form or a flat-footed form, says a lot about the politics of what women have to face almost daily in what we choose to wear.

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