In 1960, Greiner & Hausser, the successor to the doll's original manufacturer, filed a US patent for the "doll hip joint" used in Lilli and exclusively licensed the rights to Louis Marx, a New York-based toy manufacturer, for 10 years. "When it designed and launched Barbie in 1959, Mattel neither offered G&H royalties nor sought permission to use its design," Lobel wrote.īut Lilli's makers, for one, noticed the similarities between the dolls. "The secret truth that Mattel hoped to conceal was that Barbie was merely a metamorphosis of the German doll Lilli," Orly Lobel wrote in her 2017 book "You Don't Own Me: The Court Battles That Exposed Barbie's Dark Side." The company didn't stop to think about whether copying Lilli was legal, Lobel wrote. "In the end, Lilli and her new sister were barely distinguishable except to the new doll's creator," Gerber wrote. įrederic Neema/Sygma via Getty Images Chesnot/Getty Imagesīut Barbie still had Lilli's high blonde ponytail, delicate nose, and winged eyes. Lilli's hard plastic was switched for a softer material, Barbie's hair was rooted, and she was made less "curvaceous," Handler wrote.īarbie was given arched eyebrows and rooted hair, but she still had Lilli's red lips and winged eyeliner. Handler also gave Barbie tiny individual toes, unlike Lilli, whose legs simply transitioned into her shoes. Her curved eyebrows were swapped for dramatic arches and her lips were softened. The toy company ultimately made a manufacturing arrangement with a Japanese company, where production was cheaper. When Handler returned to Los Angeles later that summer, she showed Lilli to Mattel's team and finally managed to convince her colleagues of the market for such a doll. "Here were the breasts, the small waist, the long, tapered legs I had enthusiastically described for the designers all those years ago," Handler wrote.
She said that while Lilli's face was "too hard-looking and cartoonish," her body "was another story."
"The 'Lilli' doll was the embodiment of an idea I'd pitched to Elliot and our other Mattel toy designers some five years earlier," Handler wrote. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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