Barbie and the art of Robert Best

Decades ago, my mother told me that Barbie Dolls were designed just for me.

I had dozens of them, starting with the original red-lipped, black-haired Barbie in a black and white bathing suit. The Bubble Head Barbie came next, with her perfect do that to this day is still perfect, though she has laid in a box with her sorority of plastic.

Robert Best is an artist who renders images of Barbie fashions both past and current, and these 11 x 14 drawings are numbered, framed and sold.

I came across several of the images in a small woodsy shop with lots of elegant smelling lotions and greeting cards with hand pressed flowers on the front. Long swags of thick branches and intertwined flowers drape from the ceiling, and soft music mixes with the sound of small water fountains. The images are back in the corner in the children's section and they hold court with their heads held elegantly high just above the terry-teddy bears and books with frantic drawings. Barbie reigns over all, quietly and fashionably.

I go into that store occasionally and look at the dwindling fashion parade that lined the walls of the children's section and lament that my favorite image is gone. Barbie in the blue/violet floral gown that trails with sash and color, a dreamy elegance to unreal for a girl who grew up in stretch pants and rode horses.

At only $159, I could have taken her home and placed her on my wall, as a token of all the Barbies' wrapped and stashed in a fashion show held in a Roughneck Tuppeware container.

It wasn't that I knew I could dress like Barbie; I couldn't pull off sophistication even if wanted to. Her life didn't really inspire. She had the clothes, but not the anima, and she couldn't make up in wardrobe what she lacked in breath. Still, she was an escape, a kind of control in an uncontrollable world.

I was probably 12 when I bought my last Barbie, a last stroll down the pink aisle, and I lied to the checkout lady at the House of Values and told her it was for my little sister. She seemed somehow strange and wrong, like waking up and trying to remember a dream that was great while you were having it, but faded in the light of day.

In the end, I was realized that Barbies' weren't designed for me, that I was just a molded consumer of packaged fashion, but I didn't care.

My mother then came clean with the true origin of my fame and told me that she named me after the nicest person she knew: herself.