Barbies, Barbies, everywhere...

[tikistitch]

mr_tikistitch passed this one along....

Four thousand Barbie dolls up for auction

LONDON (Reuters) - Billed as the largest private collection of Barbie dolls, the lifelong passion of a Dutch mother will go under the hammer next month.

Up for sale are 4,000 dolls spanning the entire history of Barbie and her friends, family and fashions which stretches back to 1959.

"This is a collection of virtually everything -- and most of it is in mint condition as it has never been taken out of its boxes, making it particularly highly prized," said Daniel Agnew, toy expert at auction house Christie's.

Conservatively priced at around 100,000 pounds ($190,000), the collection will go on sale in London on September 26.

It was started in the early 1960s by Ietje Raebel, who bought her first Barbie for daughter Marina.

Marina spurned the doll which remained untouched in its box but Raebel got the collecting bug, inspired by Barbie's ever-changing wardrobe.

Ietje had designed clothes for herself and her friends in the 1950s and 60s before she was married and had Marina.

After that she dedicated her life to Marina and Barbie, according to Marina. Ietje stopped collecting in 2002 when she developed severe
Alzheimer's disease.

Over the years designers from Calvin Klein to Christian Dior have styled outfits for Barbie in her varied professional guises including model, astronaut, doctor, firefighter and politician.

"Pretty much all of those are represented in the collection, as well as houses, horses, hotrods and a host of other items," Agnew told Reuters....

Having been immersed in the world of Star Wars collecting for the past decade, we're actually kind of amazed that a collection of the rarest Barbie dolls has been valued for as little as $190K.

Just keep those Dutch dollies away from deranged British guard doggies!

Comments

[blukat.livejournal.com]

thanks to Mattel's terrible handling of their production of Barbie, and the major lack of quality for most of the dolls in the recent years (there have been a few, such as the DC Comics Cat Woman that do stand out), Barbie has fallen way out of favor with collectors and her value has dropped drastically.

It's sad, but an excellent example on how a company can mess up over and over again.

Maybe Mattel will be smart and buy this collection, since for years they have been claiming they were going to open a Barbie doll museum. But since most of the old stuff and prototypes walked away with the employees, who knows if they even have enough for a museum.

(my uncle use to design other stuff for Mattel, like Little Kiddles and such...Dance N Twirl Barbie was his idea, so I got a bit of an inside knowledge of the foibles of Mattel)

and lol! yeah, no guard dogs please, doggies love chewing on plastic stuff!

[annlarimer.livejournal.com]

Barbie collecting has gone into the crapper in the last few years -- even poor old Barbie Bazaar has ceased publication, and been folded into Haute Doll. There are also, as near as I can understand it, relatively few Barbie rarities -- at least few that are the equivalent of South American Blue Tri-Lingual Yakface. Unless she's got some Bild Lilys or something in there, even the hugest playline and modern-collectible collection just won't be worth that much money.

Unless you get people in bidding wars over specific items, or she's got a totally superfine Little Theater set or something, in which case anything goes.

[tikistitch.livejournal.com]

I sold off the last of my Barbies when we first moved into the house, so I'm fairly out of touch with the current market.

I know in the case of Kenner, if employees hadn't walked out with the Star Wars toy prototypes, most of it would have been destroyed.

Did you ever get out to the Barbie museum they had for a time in the Bay Area? I got the impression it was just a private collector's dolls. But, she had pretty much everything.

[tikistitch.livejournal.com]

Barbie collectors seem to be fairly resistant to collecting anything other than the finished dolls. I recall a friend came up with some unused Barbie box flats a couple years ago--the kind of thing that routinely makes Star Wars collectors go into conniptions of lust--and NO ONE wanted them.

[blukat.livejournal.com]

I actually did go there, and she had alot of dolls, crammed into a few small rooms. Most interesting were the few prototypes of older outfits like a white version of Solo in the Spotlight. I think they were at one time hoping to sell the collection to Mattel, but then there was a fire adjacent to their location so they had to deal with smoke damage. Don't ever know what happened after that.

I stopped collecting a few years ago, still have some stuff, the mod outfits and dolls are my favorites, but alot has been sold. I really only know what I see now in the stores and occasionally on the Mattel website. I think with all the different doll lines out there, many collectors have moved on to other things.

It's odd that these companies don't think about saving some of their prototypes, they are their intellectual property, and on down the line might be worth something.