Yes, it seems like everyone is celebrating Barbie. Or scrutinizing her. I got a jump on both in 1979, when I went to a cocktail party to kick off Barbie’s splashy 21st Birthday year.

It was my first reporting job, and at Toys Hobbies and Crafts, a glossy trade publication, I was always game to grab a media invite that came with h’or d'oeuvres. Mattel was hosting a PR event in one of its corporate offices to get the world excited for the doll’s major milestone. The perky guest of honor was relegated to a display case with her latest accessories. New princess phone. New fluffy mules. Attendees were mostly industry and business press, company executives, a few retailers, and a motley crew of Barbie doll collectors, lonely-looking folks that seemed far too attached to their dolls to be thinking of them as an investment. Or of Barbie as a trendsetter.

For me, events like these were a culture shock. I’d just returned from Asia and a year and a half of roaming the globe. How could I have gone from the Himalayas to this Manhattan penthouse suite with a pack of toy salesmen? I’d been sent to cover the launch of Strawberry Shortcake “the miniature doll in the miniature world” and sat through a Hasbro PR lunch of red meat, strawberry salad, strawberry soup and… well, you know the dessert. I was learning to tell a fake Tonka dump truck from a real one. Now this!

For the Barbie fete, at least, I was just a freeloading intern with no story assignment. I came for the cheese cubes and hoped for lobster ravioli.

Aficionados from the corporate side and the public chatted excitedly about Barbie’s nuances. They discussed her many outfits, boasted of rare editions and opined on Barbies’ next life move. I was shocked by their breathlessness, naively unaware that the real subject was not her hemlines or story lines, but profit margins.

Of course, this was also an era shaped by feminism. And skepticism. Of questioning if young girls should be influenced by a brassy (usually) blonde plaything who “lives” to acquire more au courant clothing to adorn her sleek, genital-free, plastic body. Like other writers in the room in pursuit of an early dinner, I was not much older than Barbie then. And I was not too subtle about rolling my eyes, the simmering twenty-something journalist transparently wondering, “aren’t we done with this?”

Jack from Mattel - all I remember of his name - was a marketing exec with a mammoth grin and perfect tie knot who offered a big sales-y hello. He sensed my cynicism. And delighted in it. “Oh come on,” he said. “Barbie has always been ahead of her time. She has her own Dream House and Dream Car. A career!” Astronaut Barbie had debuted way back in 1965. “Face it,” he joked. “She doesn’t even need Ken!”

His smile never sagged, even as he saw how stricken I looked. Did he know I wanted to be a Brenda Starr or Hildy Johnson? And that His Girl Friday would never be found at a corporate event, and for Barbie. He went on about Barbie’s independence. Her moxie, her mettle. In essence, she was fierce. (But, no. No one used that word yet. Certainly not for females.) To my horror, he had positioned her as a feminist role model. Ridiculous, I thought, indignant as I stood holding my stuffed mushrooms and Chardonnay.

Jump to 2023 and the world seems to believe Jack from Marketing was absolutely right. Or at least prescient. His more than four-decades-old Barbie rationale could serve as the basis of the current outsize marketing blitz. His isn’t-my-theory-cute work life description of Barbie, like the product, would survive. And thrive.

This summer it seems a new generation of reporters and countless commentators are writing non-stop about the big business of Barbie. Style icon. She-ro. Modern woman exemplar. The righteous now support, not deride, her. She’s hailed for diversity, for worldliness.

Jack had been joking. But he also wasn’t.

Today’s Barbie narrative is a replay of his core themes - cultural impact, gender roles, power dynamics, social structure. Her meaning. And of course, everyone is really still talking - a lot - about the money.