UNITED KINGDOM: Biggest Barbie collection ever to come up at auction currently on display at Christie's

The biggest Barbie collection ever to come up at auction is currently on display at Christie's in London. 4,000 of the tiny dolls, spanning the entire history of Barbie, her family, friends and fashion during the second half of the 20th century will be on sale on September 26. The collection was started by the mother of current owner Marina Kochen. Ietje Raebel bought the first Barbie for her daughter Marina in the early 1960s. As a part-time fashion designer Raebel was driven by her love for fashion and clothes and what started out with one doll became an impressive collection. Marina Kochen remembers how she liked Barbie but never played with her because she was so small: "As a child I didn't play with them. I liked them very much but I found them a little bit too tiny so what I did was only look at them and now I've decided to sell the dolls and luckily enough I never played with them because they are in mint (condition) and were never played with." The family home quickly filled up with Barbies when Marina joined her mother in collecting the dolls as a teenager. Leaving virtually no stone unturned between them they amassed the largest Barbie collection in private hands. "We stored all these dolls in our regular family house. My mother, she was sleeping down at the end, because the house was too small, we had three rooms upstairs filled up with the Barbie dolls, they were part of our lives" says Kochen. Christie's doll specialist Daniel Agnew has been cataloguing each doll and estimates the sale will fetch at least 100,000 pound sterling for the entire collection. "We sell Barbies at Christie's from time to time but just a few lots at a time, never in this quantity, I mean we got 4,000 dolls and it's going to be 450 lots - it's the biggest collection you've ever seen, I mean what we have on display today is just one hundredth of the collection." Amongst the collection is the first ever Barbie doll from 1959. "She's distinct because she's actually got holes in her feet which are metal lined which is where you stand her up and she looks really quite different, she has heavy eye make-up and she's quite pale and she is in the quite famous black and white swim costume. So she's like the first Barbie doll you can buy so she is very desirable to collectors" explains Agnew. Barbie was invented by Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel , in 1959. The idea came to her as she watched her daughter Barbara play with dolls, and rather than assuming they were babies, barbara was imagining them in grown-up roles. As a result, Handler decided to make a teenage doll that little girls could dream about the future with. She and her husband unveiled Barbie doll, the teenage fashion model at New York's annual Toy fair in 1959. Despite initial scepticism from the trade , the rest is history. Handel named Barbie after her daughter and during the first year of production 351,000 dolls were sold. Whilst selling the dolls is quite emotional for Kochen, she believes that Barbie will never go away. "I think Barbie is an icon. I think she's a fashion doll and she is a representative of fashion from the 60s throughout nowadays so she will always be there. She's changed a little bit her look and myself I like all the Barbies but I think she will be always there for the children and for the future collectors."

ITN Source | August 19, 2006

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