In , MGA then started another suit; this time, the Bratz kingpins sued Mattel for a billion dollars. The new case is still pending. For all the drama unfolding in the Wall Street Journal , MGA's Bratz room looks more like a fashion boutique than an open plan corporate office.
MGA only employs two designers to create the Bratz. She wears a pink-and-blue cardigan that matches her cotton-candy dyed hair. Obviously I didn't win, but I'm here now! Darma has decorated her cubicle with a skateboard, a bunch of sticks with dolls' heads on top of them, and pictures of bones. At his desk, the male designer has hung photos of hot guys painted as skeletons.
The two share an inspiration board on a wall. In the center of the room, the pair also shares a large white table they refer to as a "production table. They've covered the desk in magazines like Nylon Japan and model drawings. It's where they conceive of the dolls and try out different fabrics. Let's say unicycling is cool. So we'd do a Bratz unicycling segment—we'd take the fashions, we'd go fabric shopping, buy fabrics. Beneath a shelf are boxes filled of differently colored dolls labeled "medium black," "light pink," and "Asian light.
The designers and Campana also work together on elaborate publicity stunts. They then posted these images on social media. Their favorite stunt creation, though, is their Frida Kahlo Bratz doll. Based on fan art, the doll shows Frida in a red dress. The male designer sees Frida as an independent free spirit who wasn't afraid of controversy but was also sweet and genuine at her core. She was like an OG Brat back in the day," he explains. Bratz creator Carter Bryant testified Thursday that he drew up some plans for the dolls while he was working at Mattel Inc.
Beyond that, the Bratz girls -- with their hip-hugging outfits, bare midriffs, big shoes and pouty lips -- may have put the hurt on year-old Barbie, whose U. Bryant went to work for Mattel in and took an eight-month break to live with his mother in Missouri.
He returned to Mattel in January After an initial ruling that awarded the Bratz franchise to Mattel, a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision in Bratz dolls are somewhat controversial because of their heavy makeup, perceived attitude, and skimpy outfits.
The brand has gone through a lot of production halts, relaunches, and rebranding in the s. The change in the body style of the dolls in resulted in a significant drop in sales. The line ceased production in due to low sales. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content.
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Bratz dolls have swollen heads, pouty lips, spindly limbs, and chunky-heeled shoes. Their waists are barely wider than their necks. He meant for his Bratz to come in pick-your-own skin colors and to have monetizably vague ethnic names. The feud between Barbie and Bratz occupies the narrow space between thin lines: between fashion and porn, between originals and copies, and between toys for girls and rights for women. In , Alex Kozinski, then the chief judge of the U. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who presided over Mattel v.
MGA, wrote in his opinion that most of what makes a fashion doll desirable is not protectable intellectual property, because there are only so many ways to make a female body attractive.
But only so much exaggeration is possible, he went on. Kozinski professed astonishment. Justice is hard!
Before Barbie, dolls were babies, to be fed and burped and bathed and wheeled around in prams and put down for naps. Barbie, who has hips and breasts, was a ripoff of a magnificently racy German doll called Lilli. Lilli was inspired by the title character in a Playboy -style comic strip; she works as a secretary but is usually barely dressed, like the time she shows up at the office in a bikini.
Ruth Handler, who co-founded Mattel with her husband in , bought more than a dozen Lillis while on a tour of Europe with her children Barbie and Ken in In fact, the two dolls are nearly identical. In , Handler, having been investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, was indicted for fraud; she maintained her innocence but pleaded no contest.
Two years later, Ryan sued Mattel; Mattel settled. In , after suffering a stroke, Ryan shot himself in the head. Handler, who, after battling breast cancer, had founded a company, Nearly Me, that made prosthetic breasts, died in , the year Bratz won the Toy of the Year Award.
Mattel is believed to have sold nearly a billion Barbie dolls. Still, nine in ten American girls between the ages of three and ten own at least one Barbie doll, and, even without counting those buried in landfills, there might well be more Barbies in the United States than there are people. Barbie is both a relic from another era and a bellwether of changing ideas about women and work, sex, and men. They flirt over the phone.
Their sexcapade sparkled. By the nineteen-nineties, when three out of four women between twenty-five and fifty-four worked outside the home and Mattel was taking in a billion dollars annually in Barbie sales alone, Barbie had become a plaything for three-year-olds—girls who wore footie pajamas and pull-up diapers and who drank out of sippy cups, girls who were still toddlers.
Much of their office flirting, conducted not by telephone but by e-mail, concerns her clothes: microminis and see-through blouses—Bratz clothes.
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