The ultimate example of sexy toys for little girls, of course, are the infamous Bratz Dolls:
dolls who wear copious amounts of makeup, mid-riff bearing tops,
mini-skits, and platform heels. (Or sometimes just a bikini and a
jacket.) There was even a line of Baby Bratz which fulfilled what one assumes the manufacturers thought was an overlooked desire for sexy babies.
As
a kid I was never interested in dolls, preferring animals and dinosaurs
to Barbies. And like a lot of little girls I loved Lisa Frank. For the
uninitiated, Lisa Frank was a branded line of school supplies consisting of Trapper
Keepers and folders that looked like they were designed by a
six-year-old girl on acid. Dalmatian puppies with rainbow colored
spots, Golden Retrievers playing in buckets of upended neon colored
paint, and unicorns with rainbow manes were staples of the line.
Frank appealed to me because there were no people in her universe, just
technicolor dolphins and polar bears. So, I was more than a little
disappointed when I purchased a pad of Lisa Frank stickers at the store
yesterday on a whim and flipped the pages open to find myself staring
at what looked like Lisa Frank-ified Bratz Dolls populating the pages.
The whimsical ponies of my childhood were being straddled by big-headed
coquettes in hot-pink midriff tops.
Ostensibly, the purpose of
tampering with a brand is to adjust for what the appeals to the
audience. And while I'm sure interest in the Lisa Frank line may have
waned since the color-saturated '80s and '90s, I have to wonder if
little girls actually are more interested in bizarrely proportioned
nymphets dressed like sexy hippies than a righteous day-glo tiger cub.
And if they aren't, who are these re-designs really for?
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