Why I collect Barbie's winter coats

My sisters and I started playing with Barbie dolls in the late 1960s and continued into the early 1970s.  Those two decades saw some extremely hard winters in Greater Cincinnati, so heavy winter coats were important items of clothing, particularly to children going to and from school or playing outside.

Also, I didn't know anyone who went to balls and needed gowns, and I knew of few women who got married during that time period--I was just too young and the adults I knew not into fancy party clothes.  Our lives consisted of school and play clothes and one dress outfit per season per year, and business clothing for adults instead of school uniforms.  In other words, what my experience was were the following: heavy slacks or skirts and sweaters and long-sleeve blouses in the winter, medium-weight pastel shirts and slacks in the spring, lightweight brightly-colored tank tops and shorts in the summer, and subtle plaids in the fall.

So one set of items I started collecting as an adult was coats for Barbie and her family, both the old ones from the 1960s and 1970s and the new ones in the 1980s.  I now have a large assortment of them from the 1960s through the 1990s, and I discovered that I like taking pictures of my dolls outside in the snow.

The next five blog posts are about Barbie, Ken, Skipper and even Stacie coats, separated by their purposes.  I made an effort to find coats that were sold with boots, one, because it would be difficult to find a lost Barbie shoe in the snow, and two, who wears high heels in deep snow?!