The Mid Section

“Ruby” - The Short Lived Mascot for “The Body Shop”

by Jenn S.
March 16 2009

As you’ve no doubt noticed, the name of this blog is “The Rubenesque Gallery.”

Art History 101 time (skip ahead if you’ve already taken it):

The word Rubenesque comes from the sixteenth-century Dutch painter, Sir Peter Paul Rubens.  He is perhaps best remembered for his images of beautiful, fleshy, voluptuous nudes.  Over the past 400 or so years, the word “Rubenesque” has crept into our vocabulary to describe (you guessed it) beautiful, fleshy, voluptuous men and women.

This brings us to “Ruby,” the short-lived, rubenesque mascot for The Body Shop.  Amazing, right?  What you see above are actual advertisements for The Body Shop, and for a feminist-leaning art historian like myself with an interest in popular culture, these advertisements are the stuff dreams are made of.

Where to begin? A little history of what happened here:

Barbie manufacturer Mattel sent The Body Shop a cease and desist order after posters featuring Ruby - a self proclaimed Anti-Barbie spokesperson - started appearing in American shop windows. This banned advertisement was also forbidden to be hung in the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway. The complaints included her “nude and nippleless figure” being exposed to the public, which offended people in the US and China.  This New York Times article for a 1997 New York Times article on the topic.

So we have The Body Shop putting these images in store windows all over the world, and Mattel demanding that they be removed. Really, did the “rubenesque” barbie offend all of the other barbies?  Is barbie really that insecure?  Oh the world we live in…

The real question is: What do people find so threatening and upsetting about these advertisements?  They’re glib and funny, yet they have a real power to disturb… why?  What is it about them?  There is, of course, the immediate shock of seeing a ‘fat’ barbie.  And then, for me at least, there is a little guilt.  I feel guilty.  I feel guilty for playing with my ‘normal’ barbies and thinking that they were actually ‘normal.’  Because, of course, this barbie is far more ‘normal’.

I’m excited to hear your thoughts - please leave comments below.

P.S. For those of you interested in this sort of thing, enjoy this blog that analyzes the success of the advertising campaign. 

Have you read about the nude self-portraits by Laura Aguilar, a Mexican-American, lesbian photographer. Enjoy!

Jennifer is an art historian working in a major D.C. museum. She believes that art allows us to transcend and scrutinize our cultural perceptions and hopes to share this experience with you.

Comments

• Maurice Clay | posted March 19, 2009

  That’s fascinating! I had no idea, either. I think it’s terrible that Mattel attacked The Body Shop and tried to get them to get rid of this beautiful image that could have reassured hundreds of thousands of girls that they were okay just the way they were. Shame on Mattel.

• suzydimples | posted April 02, 2009

  I remember seeing the posters in the Body Shop window at a mall and quite honestly, they were very creepy: shiny pink plastic representations of women are never appealing, no matter what body size or shape they are!

• Nicole | posted April 10, 2009

  The Body Shop should have made a deal with Mattel and had Mattel design Ruby an authentic plus size Barbie Diva (tm) wardrobe.  Barbie Diva Ruby (tm) hating to have dry skin, also moisturizes regularly with The Body Shop’s all natural Body Butter and exfoliates regularly with The Body Shop’s fair-trade, all natural bath salts.  Now everyone can make money off women equally.

• salty.phoenix | posted October 01, 2009

  I love this…I had a poster of that ad in college…wish I still had it!

• TechnoMom | posted July 24, 2010

  I loved them! I still have a poster, and it hung in our living room for years! It needs a new frame at the moment, or it would be there right now.

  I had stickers, too, that they gave out - I’m sure that I still have a few around here somewhere, although I used most of them and my daughter, Katie, used as many as I would allow her (hey, she was 7 years old!). She *really* wanted a Ruby doll, too! She wasn’t big on Barbie, greatly preferring Xena, but Ruby was cool :-)

  I remember my father being utterly disgusted with the poster and stickers, especially with me giving some of them to Katie. He said they were obscene. I pointed out that he’d seen Barbie dolls in the nude plenty of times, and had never made any complaint about their exposure. He insisted that Ruby was “just different” but wouldn’t say it was because she was fat. That’s what he meant, but he knew we’d be at it hammer and tongs if he came right out and said it.

  As an aside, at least one mall in our area (metro Atlanta, Georgia) refused to allow the posters to be displayed in the front windows of the shop because they were “vulgar.” Excuse me? As if the Frederick’s of Hollywood windows down the way were so classy?

  I wrote a letter to the management when I heard what happened, but never heard anything back from them. A few weeks later, I wrote another letter, letting them and their corporate headquarters know that I wouldn’t be shopping in any of the properties they managed any more as a result.

  A few days later, I received a letter that said nothing about Ruby, but apologized for the lack of response to the first letter and included a $25 gift certificate good for at any store in the mall. I promptly covered it in Ruby stickers and sent it back to them. That felt very satisfying.