Last month I had my silver Barbie collecting anniversary and I didn’t even realize it. I think it happened due to a lot of work in the pre-December time. December is always the month with the biggest amount of work. I have holidays around Christmas and I have to pre-produce my videos for December/January in advance. So time is short and the time schedule really tight.
That’s how I completely forgot about my silver Barbie collecting anniversary. It all started by the end of November 1996 after having seen a Barbie Collectibles catalog with all these great Barbie dolls from the Great Eras collection, BobMackie, Escada, The Hollywood Movie series, Wedding Flowers collection with a lot of porcelain Barbie dolls that are unfortunately not produced anymore and other great Barbie dolls.
These dolls made me start to collect although they were very expensive at first and were marketed exclusively through only very special toy shops. You were not able to find them in every toy shop. So at first I had to drive with my parents to Hamburg, Germany or Bremen, Germany to have a chance to see any of them. I was living back then in a province near the North Sea. We had toy shops in town but they had no Collectibles. The Dolls of the World ( like the one below) were the only Barbie dolls to be found. With 50DM (25 euros) of costs for one doll they were pretty expensive while normal playline Barbie dolls were only up to 35 DM (17 euros).
In times when the internet just started it was impossible to buy online especially when you were under age. I was only eleven when I made the decision to become a collector. This was a very intentional decision. Through all my collector life I was able to learn a lot of things. I learned more than other fellows in the same age. For example one of the first Barbie dolls that inspired me was the Victorian Lady Barbie ( one of my very early gifts from my parents) and made me interested in this time period concerning fashion and other things. It’s not just this one doll that inspired me to look beyond my own nose. I not even improved my English for understanding the texts on the boxes better but also inspired me to learn more than just one foreign language. I focused my learning habits around what interested me and it made me pretty successful in school.
By the way I think I often made my parents mad because my interests were not the interests of a normal teenager. My ideas were always different and I made my parents often to drive to special toy stores in the pre-Christmas time in the hope to find one of these very special dolls. Sometimes we were lucky and sometimes not.