
I Want To Play Barbie Dress Up Games Now
When Ibtihaj Muhammad hit the arena at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, she anon bent the absorption of women everywhere. As the aboriginal Muslim-American woman to action a hijab while aggressive for the United States, she was an burning hero. She went on to acquire the brownish badge as allotment of Team USA.
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Now the 31-year-old Olympian has her actual own Barbie. Muhammad joins women such as Olympic gold advocate Gabby Douglas, Selma administrator Ava DuVernay and ballerina Misty Copeland in the Mattel Inc.’s Shero line, which ceremoniousness women who breach boundaries. Mattel Inc., the maker of Barbie, says the baby will be accessible online abutting fall.
“I’m aflame and accustomed and humbled. I absolutely attending up to the women that accept been allotment of the Shero affairs antecedent to me, and I anticipate this is a admirable account of women to join,” Muhammad told The Undefeated. “Barbie’s been a absolutely big allotment of my activity as a kid, so to now accept my actual own Barbie, I don’t know, it’s about like an impossible feeling. A lot of excitement.”
Muhammad agrees that Mattel’s efforts adjoin assortment are apocalyptic of today’s times.
“I think, as a company, Mattel has absitively to accomplish a accommodation to be across-the-board and to bless diversity,” she said. “So to accept dolls of assorted sizes and altered bark tones, and now to alike accept a baby that acutely wears hijabs and is modeled afterwards an American Olympian, I anticipate is revolutionary. I achievement that added brands, abnormally in the toy industry, follow. It’s important for accouchement to see themselves represented in the toys that they comedy with.”
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The new baby bears a arresting affinity to Muhammad, who says the affinity is uncanny.
Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
“I wasn’t assured the baby to attending absolutely like me,” she said. “I anticipate that Mattel’s absolutely nailed it, all the way bottomward to the eyeliner, which was absolutely important to me that the baby had, because I adulation a acceptable active liner.
“I assumption Mattel is affective advanced and alteration this acceptable way that Barbie has been fabricated in the past. They accept dolls now in altered sizes. My Barbie baby isn’t alpine and, like, absolutely leggy. My baby has these added toned, able-bodied legs, which are added cogitating to the anatomy blazon of myself and added athletes. I achievement that this creates a added absolute image, abnormally in agreement of the anatomy angel for adolescent girls who comedy with the doll.”
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The best important aspect in the Shero band of dolls for Muhammad is that adolescent girls accept the bulletin abaft it.
“What we appetite to animate little girls to accept is that they can be annihilation and anyone that they want,” she said. “One of the abundant things about baby comedy is that accouchement are able to brainstorm themselves in any role, accomplishing anything, actuality anyone and accomplishing whatever they want.”
Muhammad said the hardest allotment of her all-embracing adventure is the obstacles that she’s faced as an African-American, and as a Muslim changeable athlete, growing up and developing in the action of fencing.
“A lot of them do accept to do with actuality discriminated against,” she said. “I capital to embrace those difficulties in my journey, abnormally like they’re notches in the belt, and it’s helped me accomplish and get to area I am as an athlete. I would say that one of the best active things in allowance me accomplish the success I accept as an amateur is acquirements to accept in myself. That’s additionally allotment of the messaging that I would like to extend to little girls who acquirement a Barbie from this Shero line, is that aggregate that they charge is already inside. We’re all activity to be faced with obstacles in our life, and it’s how we access and how we handle these things that makes us, and that dictates our approaching and makes us who we are.”
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The baby additionally is donning a dress from Muhammad’s accouterment line, Louella, called afterwards her grandmother.
“I was given, in accession to my baby fabricated in my able-bodied apparel, I additionally had a additional baby fabricated in an black dress, and they modeled it afterwards a dress that I wore to The ESPYS.”
Kelley Evans is a accepted editor at The Undefeated. She is a aliment passionista, helicopter mom and an unapologetic southerner who spends every night with the casting of The Adolescent and the Restless by way of her couch.
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