Barbie’s Dream House

Are you one of the millions of kids who played happily with a Barbie Dream House?

If you are, you’ll relish reading Julie Lasky’s “A Six-Decade Tour of Barbie’s Dreamhouses” (2022, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/14/style/barbie-dreamhouse-history-six-decades.html).

Lasky shares, for example, that Mattel and PIN-UP’s recent book Barbie Dreamhouse:  An Architectural Survey“examines the cultural and architectural forces that shaped the Dreamhouses over the decades, including Queen Anne Victorianism, midcentury modernism and back-to-the-land granola-ism.”  Lasky’s article is lavishly illustrated, so no matter what your Barbie Dreamhouse era is, you’ll find photos that will throw you into a nostalgic tizzy.

Lasky discusses forces undergirding the form of different homes over the years, for example, regarding the current Dreamhouse “While the first Dreamhouse unfolded like a sitcom set for a single camera, the most recent iteration is a TikTok-ready tower that can be filmed from infinite angles — not unlike the real-life collab houses where influencers create content.”