- 2014-03-04 Mashable - Lammily.jpg (23.38 KiB) Viewed 1419 times
Photo gallery of the doll:Andrea Romano for Mashable wrote:Her name is Lammily. She's an average American 19-year-old. And she's beautiful.
Lammily was created by Nickolay Lamm, an artist known online for his digital visualizations. Lammily's Normal Barbie series took the measurements of the average American woman and compared them to the famous plastic doll. After the positive response Lamm saw with the images, he decided to create a real doll that would better represent an ordinary body type.
The Lammily doll could create some healthy competition for Mattel, who just launched Barbie's "unapologetic" marketing campaign for the 2014 Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. Barbie has always fielded criticism for her unattainable body, and the latest campaign, including an op-ed from the doll herself, points to no signs of Mattel changing their designs.
Lamm's crowdsourcing campaign for the Lammily doll is up and running, and he hopes to produce 5,000 dolls. The doll features articulated joints and minimal makeup. According to Lamm's video, he hopes the doll will "promote realistic beauty standards."
http://mashable.com/2014/03/05/realistic-barbie-doll/
Complete article:Sydney Brownstone for Fast Company's Co.Exist wrote:Researchers at the University Central Hospital in Helsinki, Finland found that if Barbie's proportions existed on a real human being, she wouldn't have the 17% to 22% body fat necessary to menstruate. And while it's difficult to gauge, there is some empirical evidence that Barbie could affect a girl's self-image: A 2006 study published in Developmental Psychology, for example, found that significantly more little girls exposed to images of Barbie (versus exposure to various picture books), reported being unhappy with their bodies and expressed the desire to be thinner then and as an adult.
There's no way to tell if it's the dissatisfaction with Barbie's form that has had an impact on Mattel's weakening sales numbers for the doll. Yet, in 2013, Barbie sales slumped by 6%, then showed a 13% drop from the previous year during the holidays. Last month, lead designer Kim Culmone also doubled down on Barbie's proportions in an interview with Co.Design's Mark Wilson, explaining away her starved proportions as necessary for the clothes, and asserting that the body image issue was moot.
But when I ask Lamm what he makes of Barbie's strange (and what Culmone would argue as necessary) proportions to service her clothes, he points to the fact that doll clothing could simply be thinner and more flexible. "I’m 100% sure there’s something called thinner materials, and that’s my response to [Mattel]. I actually put some Barbie clothes on my original model, and she looked pretty good."
http://www.fastcoexist.com/3026926/fund ... rfect-body
Nickolay Lamm's video of the new doll:
