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Our favorite body image distorting girls dolls have landed a new market to unrealistically represent: Tibet! 300 stylishly clad Tibetan Barbie dolls are now on display at an airport in Lhasa.
The plastic princesses are part of a line of special edition “ethnic” dolls meant to represent the minority groups of China.
From Xinhua:
Each doll has long braided hair with coral and manual silver accessories, wears necklaces made of coral or turquoise and is adorned with an amulet "Gawu", showing a rich ethnic feature.
After their exhibition at Gonggar Airport, the dolls will be sold off to Europeans to promote cultural awareness about Tibet. That's great and all, but we're sort of disappointed we won't be able to get our hands on this showpiece of diversity over here in Shanghai. If that's not what the Barbie megastore is for, then what is?
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Hey Xinhua! "Barbie" is a specific type of doll referring to the blonde overly curvy doll made by Mattel (and her beau Ken), NOT a generic term for female dolls.
Y'all need to update your style guide.
I think the Xinhua editors just assumed "Barbie" was short for "barbarian" in this instance, don'tcha know yuk yuk yuk. Ya gotta "Han" it to 'em!
Now off to that China Marathon post to make some bad butt puns!
Kinda funny to hear them use it like this but that is indeed the power of branding. Asking for a kleenex versus a tissue, a ziploc bag, or making a xerox copy of something all started like this...
Does anyone else think it is sad that cultural awareness about Tibet is being promoted by plastic dolls?
And if these are not made by Barbie, Xinhua better watch out. With all of the trouble China has with intellectual property issues, all Xinhua needs is to be "branded" as a promoter of intellectual property violations, whether accidental or not.