Playing Barbie in Sixties Egypt
In the early Sixties, in Nasser’s “socialist” Egypt, you could not come by anything imported, and I absolutely longed for a Barbie doll. When an uncle went to the States, he brought back one for me. The stereotypical Barbie, of course, there was no other at the time, and she came with just the swimsuit she stood up in. Ordering additional outfits or accessories was out of the question, but that was not a problem.
I was on the older side to be playing with dolls, anyway, and the pleasure, for me, was designing, cutting and sewing dresses for my Barbie. There were always plenty of fabric scraps left over from the summer frocks and nightgowns the “little dressmaker” ran up for me on a freestanding, iron Singer sewing machine that occupied most of a small room in our house. My mother could not sew to save her life, but it was common in those days to have a dressmaker come to one’s house to do the sewing, and I can still conjure the sound of that foot pedal running “drrrrrrrrr” from the sewing room, off and on for hours at the beginning of every season.
For proper dresses the dressmaker often copied patterns from Burda, a German magazine, painstakingly expanding them to scale and size on butcher paper, and then cutting the fabric along the lines. Then came the lengthy process of fittings, which I hated, having to stand on a stool while having the dress carefully slipped over my head, first with the fabric held together with prickly pins, then very loosely stitched at the seams, then finally sewn up properly on the Singer sewing machine, the hems and linings finished by hand.
So I always had plenty of fabric scraps for my Barbie’s dresses: cotton lawn, silk chiffon, even upholstery velvet. I started with boat neck shifts, as they were the easiest style to cut, and stitched them up with a handheld sewing tool like a large stapler. It came in handy, since I was the despair of my governess, who had tried in vain to teach me the simplest of stem stitches. She herself truly had what she called in French “fairy hands,” but I was my mother’s daughter when faced with needle and thread.
Now that I look at my grandaughter’s generation, surrounded by multiple Barbies with closets full of ready-made Barbie clothes and accessories, their gigantic doll houses and Barbie cars and swimming pools, none of which seem to hold children’s attention for more than a couple of hours, it makes me wonder. I know I had endless hours of entertainment with the creative process of dressing up my mannequin doll. It makes me wonder. Was I really so deprived in comparison, with my one Barbie and her homemade clothes in Sixties Egypt?
