Mattel Barbie Tennis Champion

Product Information

Barbie was like no doll before her. Created by Ruth Handler, Barbie was named after Handler’s daughter and anatomically modeled after the German doll Bild Lilli, who was a sort of pinup totem marketed toward male readers of the racy tabloid Bild. Handler’s breakthrough was that a doll could represent an anatomically adult woman and be played with by girls who would see and imagine their possible adulthoods through the doll, rather than the previous dolls for children which represented babies and other young children that were designed to nurture a young girl’s maternal instincts.

King, who narrowly missed being in the target demographic when Barbie debuted, said she grew up with “dolls in one corner of the bedroom,” while the other corner held “bats, mitts, and then eventually tennis stuff.” Rather than rejecting the fashion component of Barbie, King said she embraces it as a student of history. She was also called a "goddess" by one of her supporters which followed a similar theme in her comments section. This collectible Barbie® doll is sculpted to Naomi's likeness and features flexibility for endless posing possibilities. Barbie® honors Naomi Osaka, record-breaking professional tennis player and champion for change, as a Barbie® Role Model. Billie Jean King Barbie is also considerably more muscular-looking than the other Barbies. She’s got real biceps, visible calves and quads—again, more accurately personifying the actual Billie Jean King than Stone.

Billie Jean King admitted she hesitated when approached by Mattel about making her into a Barbie, but was impressed after doing “some homework” on the doll’s history, and was further impressed to hear that her doll would be launched alongside Ella Fitzgerald and Florence Nightingale dolls. “I love Ruth Handler, how she thought about why she did it,” King told me. “She did it for independence, for girls to imagine that they could be anything. So that’s the reason I did it, because of her philosophy.”

Though Ryan designed Barbie, the concept came from Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler. Handler was traveling through Europe with her kids when she came across a German Bild Lilli doll, who was anything but kid-friendly: Lilli was a high-class call girl who began her life as a comic and was sold in smoke shops and adult toy stores. But Handler—who had mentioned the idea of an adult doll to her Mattel exec husband before—liked what she saw. Her husband Elliot had initially balked at the idea, but the Lilli dolls sold him on the concept. Tennis Coach Barbie, I realize, can’t model particularly good technique. Though she can spread her legs, her knees cannot bend. Her left arm is rigidly straight; her right elbow is bent at an acute angle. A tennis swing would require an arm to achieve both, but not just one or the other. Her racquet holding is not particularly textbook, either: Her racquet comes with a helpful handle attachment, but she can only hold it so the face is close to parallel to the ground. The bag accessory, however, scores points—the racquet slides in smoothly, and its strap rests nicely in her bent elbow. She looks much more comfortable with a handbag than a forehand. But as Mattel’s online game taught me, the point is for Barbie to be dressed for tennis, not to actually play tennis. I’m reminded of one of King’s catchphrases: “You have to see it to be it.” Well, with Tennis Coach Barbie, at least there’s a visual.Recently, however, Barbie has been nodding toward history as well, and bringing tennis along with it. While Gloria Steinem recently called Barbie “everything we didn’t want to be and were being told to be,” in the 2018 documentary Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie , one of Steinem’s contemporaries in the 1970s women’s-lib movement embraced the chance to be Barbiefied. Just as Barbie has engaged with tennis, so too have tennis manufacturers engaged with Barbie. In 2005, Head launched a series of pink children’s racquets with Barbie branding for the 2005 holiday season. Barbie can also happily go downscale, however. M.G. Lord, the author of Forever Barbie , wrote that “Americans often argue that this country has infinite class mobility, which is, of course, hyperbolic—for everyone except Barbie. Barbie can not only ascend the social ladder, she can occupy several classes at once.” Naomi Osaka Barbie® doll makes a great gift for collectors, tennis fans and kids ages 6 years old and up. Doll stand and Certificate of Authenticity included.

The American has become a popular figure on the internet thanks to her raunchy content surrounding the sport of tennis as she's cultivated a following of 312,000 on the social media platform. Naomi Osaka Barbie® doll is ready to hit the court in a Nike tennis dress with brushstroke print, inspired by a look she sported at a major match in 2020. When Trixie Mattel, a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race , walked the runway of the reality competition show’s main stage in the season 7 premiere, she wore a bodysuit that emulated the hinges of a naked Barbie doll, to show off her life-in-plastic-it’s-fantastic aesthetic, modeled after the doll’s exaggerated femininity. She accessorized her “nude illusion” look with a pink visor, and held in her right hand the archetypal Barbie accessory: a pink tennis racquet. Handler would later write in her autobiography, “My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be. Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices.”Tennis has been a pillar of Barbie’s world since her formative years—the first tennis outfits and accessories for Barbie hit the shelves in 1962, just three years after Barbie debuted in 1959. Tennis has been a Barbie mainstay ever since, with her countless outfits evolving alongside on-court trends from preppy whites to brightly colored synthetic fabrics. Though feminists of King’s generation might consider the notion of a Billie Jean King Barbie oxymoronic, Lord believes that its inclusion reflects Mattel’s reading of the current day, as they always have strived to do.

My G.I. Joe was one rough, tough hombre; so rough, in fact, that one day he beat up my eleven-year-old older sister’s Ken doll and absconded with Barbie,” wrote author Steven Hill in the collection of essays Male Lust: Pleasure, Power, and Transformation . “My G.I. Joe carried off Barbie like a prized Helen of Troy. She was [G.I. Joe’s] prize for besting that wimp Ken, who could hardly defend the beautiful Barbie with only his tennis racquet, dressed in those limy green Bermuda shorts.” In 2019, the classic tennis brand Sergio Tacchini made a pink, blue, and yellow tennis dress for its women’s players, inspired by the Totally Hair Barbie from 1992, to commemorate the doll’s 60th birthday. A Barbie doll wearing the Sergio Tacchini dress was also sold at the 2019 Italian Open.Perhaps because of my online fashion training, I decide to see how Billie Jean King and the Tennis Coach Barbie would look if they swapped outfits. I pull apart the Velcro down the front of Billie Jean King’s dress and am immediately mortified by the sight of a topless Billie Jean King. I just stripped an equal rights icon! It feels…just…wrong, being confronted by Billie’s bare bosoms. I look away as I pull off her undershorts. Side by side, it’s clearer how much bigger Billie is—her arms, her waist, even her breasts are proportionally bigger. It’s difficult putting Tennis Coach Barbie into Billie Jean King Barbie’s dress—I can only do it if I put it on her left arm first, and then carefully work the bent right arm into the hole. The dress is loose and unflattering on her, shapeless and matronly. Billie Jean King Barbie has little trouble, with all her bendiness, sliding into Tennis Coach Barbie’s outfit, but it makes her look much more boxy and broad-shouldered. Not that this is a bad thing for an athlete, of course, but it’s a strange look for a Barbie. But as I move her more, and bend the knees, I realize that with gain in function comes a significant loss of form. Knees that can bend, it turns out, are pretty darn ugly-looking. Tennis Coach Barbie’s legs didn’t work, really, but they were considerably nicer-looking.