Everybody has a Barbie story. Here’s how 4 local leaders remember the iconic doll.

Like any wildly successful icon, Barbie has been both reviled and revered. But she is always a diva, flashing her practiced smile, our barbs and compliments bouncing off her plastic body as she stands unperturbed.

Her metrics prove she’s the ultimate ”It Girl”: The brand brought in almost $1.5 billion in 2022, and the dolls have been sold in over 150 countries. And the Barbie movie, released just last weekend, broke box-office records with an opening weekend haul of $337 million globally.

With over 1 billion dolls sold since her birth in 1959, Barbie connects millions of adults who may share little else but the memory of playing with her. Almost everyone has a Barbie story.

Here are a few.

It was the late 1970s when Ala Stanford started playing with Barbie, but it wasn’t a completely “warm and fuzzy” experience. First, Barbie was expensive and Stanford’s mother had to buy the knock-off brand from the Woolworths or Kmart.

“The Barbie doll’s elbow and knee could bend and the Barbie dolls were softer — more like skin. The dolls we got were plastic and hollow, so much so, if you squeezed them too hard they would break,” Stanford said.

And then there was the hair.

“There were different kinds of Barbies. They came in a box with a pink background, but it was the Barbie head with the hair on it that I remember the most,” Stanford said.

Although there have been Black dolls in the Barbie line since 1969, the first Black and Hispanic dolls named Barbie weren’t released until 1980. The problem with the Barbie head, for Stanford, was that although it had brown skin, it had straight hair.

“That wasn’t my hair,“ said Stanford, who spent hours trying to imitate her own natural hair styles on her Barbie head. One lesson she learned at 8 years old was that she didn’t fit in the “illusion of beauty” that Barbie represented.

Still, the lure of Barbie is strong. One Christmas, out shopping with her family, Stanford purchased a Black doctor Barbie as a collectible, one of the 250 careers Barbie has had in her 64 years.

“I remember buying it and keeping in the box. Definitely Black Barbie looked more like me. I thought, ‘Wow, if only I had this when little’,” she said.

For Kristen Donnelly, Barbie wasn’t about fashion and hair. “I didn’t spend hours brushing her hair.”

“I was born in 1983, and I remember playing with Barbies all throughout my childhood.”

It was all about the Princess adventure fantasy. Donnelly grew up surrounded by Barbies, eventually owning 200 of them. Her favorites were always the Barbies in princess outfits. But Donnelly’s Princess Barbie wasn’t exactly the traditional royal. She may have been fabulously turned out (of course!), but she would often choose career over marrying the prince.

Donnelly spent her childhood creating elaborate modern feminist stories which usually ended with Barbie saving herself. (Sorry, Ken.)

But Donnelly also couldn’t see her young self in the idealized doll whose physical dimensions have been reported to damage the very self-esteem of the millions of girls who play with her.

“I’ve been fat most of my life,” said Donnelly. But she refuses to join the chorus of Barbie haters.

She believes Barbie was the country’s scapegoat. “Barbie gets a lot of flack — but she was the flagship of a culture that polices women’s bodies into certain shapes.”

Today, Barbie is more diverse than ever with 35 skin tones, 97 hair styles, and nine body types. “I am glad Mattel has listened to so much feedback,” Donnelly said.

Joanna E. McClinton started playing with Barbie when she was 5 years old. According to the National Museum of Play, the average American girl owns 10 Barbies. But McClinton’s mother struggled financially so McClinton never had more than one Barbie to play with.

“I didn’t have a big collection of Barbies,” recalled McClinton. She would get together with her girlfriends who had Barbie houses and cars and full clothes collections and the fun would begin. The same kind of fun she has today with her 6-year-old goddaughter when the two of them get together to build a Barbie house or play with another accessory.

McClinton insists that Barbie is a toy. Period.

“It was not profoundly deep,” McClinton said, adding that it wasn’t until she was a young adult she learned about the Barbie controversies — that Barbie’s strong fashionista sense limited girl’s vision, and her unreal body curves established impossible female beauty standards.

“Barbie was a little woman that I held in my hands and could dress up. I remember that Barbie was spectacularly beautiful until we would cut her hair,” McClinton chuckled.

What McClinton said she doesn’t recall is all of Barbie’s jobs, including a pilot, Navy admiral, astronaut, and president. “I don’t remember her having all the career and jobs,” said McClinton, Pennsylvania’s first female speaker of the House.

About nine out of 10 American girls own at least one Barbie doll, according to the National Museum of Play. Shirley Moy was part of the small minority that didn’t own one.

“I can’t help you with the Barbie dolls. We played with Dawn dolls. I don’t know why we had Dawn dolls,” Moy said.

Topper Toys, an Elizabeth, N.J. company, introduced Dawn dolls in the early ‘70s. The company went bankrupt a few years later. For a brief time, the Dawn doll, which was 6-and-a-half inches tall, became a rival of the taller Barbie. She may have been of similar quality and had a rack of clothes, but she was smaller, cheaper, and sold in grocery stores — not department stores where Barbie was purchased.

“My recollection is that Dawn doll was not as sexualized as Barbie,” Moy said. “She still had breasts, but she was skinnier, not the same (as Barbie).”

As with all Barbie rivals, Dawn faded away after a few years, mostly forgotten.

Barbie smiles on, stylishly surviving through it all.