Dressed the history of fashion is a production of Dressed Media.

With over 8 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common.

Every day, we all get dressed.

Welcome to Dressed, the history of fashion.

A podcast that explores the who, what, when, of why we wear.

We are fashion historians and your host, April Callahan, and Cassidy Zachary.

Welcome Dressed listeners to part three and the conclusion of our series on the fashion

history of Barbie, who we have clearly established at this point. It's so much more than just a plastic

child's toy. And actually, so much more than the originally promised two episodes, April is

yours. I am not surprised to say. So in Barbie's 60 plus years, she has become a

pop cultural global and fashion phenomenon, who is both a reflection of any given time within

which she lives as much as she is a central part of any number of conversations in that time,

surrounding identity, representation, gender, race, sexuality, and those conversations,

of course, continue into the present day. We concluded Tuesday's episode in the 1980s,

which witnessed Barbie's transition from being a doll wearing fashion inspired by contemporary

fashion designers to a doll being dressed by many of those same fashion designers, including

Oscar de la Vrenta, who was the first fashion designer to officially license his name and designs

to Barbie, and also Billy Boy, who was the first fashion designer to create a limited edition

designer Barbie targeting the adult collector's market. And while Billy Boy at the time was reported

as the owner of the largest collection of Barbie dolls in the world, he had something like 10,000

Barbies, he was by no means the only one. I found articles mentioning adult Barbie collectors as

early as 1979, April, when some of these collectors caught the attention of the New York times who

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