Naomi Osaka Barbie® doll is ready to hit the court in a Nike tennis dress with brushstroke print, inspired by a look she sported at a major match in 2020. Naomi Osaka Barbie® doll makes a great gift for collectors, tennis fans and kids ages 6 years old and up. Doll stand and Certificate of Authenticity included. She was also called a "goddess" by one of her supporters which followed a similar theme in her comments section.

Recently, however, Barbie has been nodding toward history as well, and bringing tennis along with it. While Gloria Steinem recently called Barbie “everything we didn’t want to be and were being told to be,” in the 2018 documentary Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie , one of Steinem’s contemporaries in the 1970s women’s-lib movement embraced the chance to be Barbiefied. WTA player Barbora Strycova, who wore the dress and “loved the colors,” said she grew up getting Barbies for Christmas each year, and said she could see the doll’s essence represented on the tour. I think the tent has gotten bigger, and it’s probably gotten bigger because I don’t think corporations ever do anything that is not in their financial interest,” Lord told me. “Probably mothers remember the historic match with Bobby Riggs—or don’t even remember, because they were not alive. The doll’s identity is very fluid now, and I think when people deride things as being Barbie-like, they’re thinking of the original doll, not necessarily what the thing is today.”My G.I. Joe was one rough, tough hombre; so rough, in fact, that one day he beat up my eleven-year-old older sister’s Ken doll and absconded with Barbie,” wrote author Steven Hill in the collection of essays Male Lust: Pleasure, Power, and Transformation . “My G.I. Joe carried off Barbie like a prized Helen of Troy. She was [G.I. Joe’s] prize for besting that wimp Ken, who could hardly defend the beautiful Barbie with only his tennis racquet, dressed in those limy green Bermuda shorts.” The American has become a popular figure on the internet thanks to her raunchy content surrounding the sport of tennis as she's cultivated a following of 312,000 on the social media platform. King, who narrowly missed being in the target demographic when Barbie debuted, said she grew up with “dolls in one corner of the bedroom,” while the other corner held “bats, mitts, and then eventually tennis stuff.” Rather than rejecting the fashion component of Barbie, King said she embraces it as a student of history. Barbie can also happily go downscale, however. M.G. Lord, the author of Forever Barbie , wrote that “Americans often argue that this country has infinite class mobility, which is, of course, hyperbolic—for everyone except Barbie. Barbie can not only ascend the social ladder, she can occupy several classes at once.”

Tennis Coach Barbie, I realize, can’t model particularly good technique. Though she can spread her legs, her knees cannot bend. Her left arm is rigidly straight; her right elbow is bent at an acute angle. A tennis swing would require an arm to achieve both, but not just one or the other. Her racquet holding is not particularly textbook, either: Her racquet comes with a helpful handle attachment, but she can only hold it so the face is close to parallel to the ground. The bag accessory, however, scores points—the racquet slides in smoothly, and its strap rests nicely in her bent elbow. She looks much more comfortable with a handbag than a forehand. But as Mattel’s online game taught me, the point is for Barbie to be dressed for tennis, not to actually play tennis. I’m reminded of one of King’s catchphrases: “You have to see it to be it.” Well, with Tennis Coach Barbie, at least there’s a visual. Though Ryan designed Barbie, the concept came from Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler. Handler was traveling through Europe with her kids when she came across a German Bild Lilli doll, who was anything but kid-friendly: Lilli was a high-class call girl who began her life as a comic and was sold in smoke shops and adult toy stores. But Handler—who had mentioned the idea of an adult doll to her Mattel exec husband before—liked what she saw. Her husband Elliot had initially balked at the idea, but the Lilli dolls sold him on the concept. But as I move her more, and bend the knees, I realize that with gain in function comes a significant loss of form. Knees that can bend, it turns out, are pretty darn ugly-looking. Tennis Coach Barbie’s legs didn’t work, really, but they were considerably nicer-looking.In 2019, the classic tennis brand Sergio Tacchini made a pink, blue, and yellow tennis dress for its women’s players, inspired by the Totally Hair Barbie from 1992, to commemorate the doll’s 60th birthday. A Barbie doll wearing the Sergio Tacchini dress was also sold at the 2019 Italian Open. Billie Jean King admitted she hesitated when approached by Mattel about making her into a Barbie, but was impressed after doing “some homework” on the doll’s history, and was further impressed to hear that her doll would be launched alongside Ella Fitzgerald and Florence Nightingale dolls. “I love Ruth Handler, how she thought about why she did it,” King told me. “She did it for independence, for girls to imagine that they could be anything. So that’s the reason I did it, because of her philosophy.” Tennis has been a pillar of Barbie’s world since her formative years—the first tennis outfits and accessories for Barbie hit the shelves in 1962, just three years after Barbie debuted in 1959. Tennis has been a Barbie mainstay ever since, with her countless outfits evolving alongside on-court trends from preppy whites to brightly colored synthetic fabrics.