The Pandora doll was the must-have item for any European woman who wanted to remain at the forefront of fashion. In the17th and 18th centuries, as France grew to assert its position as the source of style, the dolls were manufactured and dressed in the latest designs and then sent to women keen to see how they should be dressed.
Their production coincided with the growth of the wealthier middle class with more money to spend on fashion, and an easing of laws that had restricted spending according to social rank, particularly on products deemed as luxuries.
Made of wood or wax, they varied in size from 2.5 centimetres all the way to life size. At the higher end, they had sparkling glass eyes and painted faces, and their hair was styled to match their outfits in the latest look. So desirable were these dolls that wealthy women would display them in their boudoirs or shops and charge a viewing fee.
These dolls served as the perfect advertising method for the French fashion industry. They were also representations of France asserting its cultural superiority.
Fast forward several hundred years and the Pandora has been replaced by Barbie. Both act as ideals of female beauty and assert a certain kind of status by being aspirational consumer items.
For 56 years, Barbie shipped its western ideal of blonde, blue-eyed hyper femininity around the world dressed in the latest American fashions. It wouldn’t be a stretch to call Barbie an icon of western cultural imperialism, just as the Pandora asserted French consumerism and cultural superiority. But times are changing.
Barbie has been affected by a global change in the willingness of women – particularly non-white women – to accept only one kind of beauty image. Women are increasingly fed up with seeing perfect femininity as something other than how they look. In particular, when that imagery is translated into the first depiction of femininity through dolls given to their daughters, they are fighting the fact that it inevitably denies those children a sense of self-representation.
It’s no wonder that toymaker Mattel has reinvented Barbie this year, with a range of dolls in a variety of sizes and skin tones. There was a collective hurrah when they were announced.
Yet it was 24-year-old Nigerian Haneefah Ahmed’s reinvention of Barbie that has caught the collective imagination. Her Hijarbie has specially designed hijabs and other modest clothes, and is featured on her own Instagram account.
Ahmed says her creations are about improving self-esteem by giving children toys that adopt your religion and culture, and show them in your own likeness.
Hijarbie is fashion forward. And it reflects the growing Muslim fashion industry that has been born of Muslim women asserting their faith and fashion credentials as going hand in hand. But she’s more than a toy; she’s a witty response to Muslim women being ignored – sometimes wilfully – from depictions of beauty today.
Both Pandora and Barbie stem from eras where cultural power was tied to a central source of production. With less willingness for passive consumption, the days of the manufactured beauty that Pandora and Barbie imposed are numbered.
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf and blogs at www. spirit21.co.uk