Vera, Vera. How could you even contemplate launching a Barbie wedding dress - for human beings? This is Vera Wang by the way, an alumna of the Sorbonne in Paris, a history graduate of the academically rigorous Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester County, New York State, the erstwhile fashion editor of American Vogue and the designer behind a hugely successful bridal line, oft worn by such luminous marrying types as Uma Thurman and ... J-Lo, Mariah Carey, Sharon Stone. Hmm, perhaps therein lies the answer. Mattel, the toy company that sells a Barbie every two seconds, has deep coffers, especially when it comes to commemorating the 50th anniversary of its “iconic” cash cow. End of mystery.

Still, Barbie couldn't be more antithetical to the androgynous Martha-Graham-meets-Japanese-deconstructionist aesthetic favoured by Wang in her New York catwalk shows.

While Mattel has made various right-on gestures towards multiculturalism over the years - Malaysian Barbie, Nigerian Barbie - one senses that the company's heart wasn't in it, since no matter which nationhood she was appealing to, her vital statistics - like her wardrobe - have remained a triumph of pornographic fantasy over probability.

And, incredibly, on Planet Barbie vital really does still refer to her bust to hip to waist ratio, rather than her GCSEs, salary or weeks in the Big Brother house. There is absolutely nothing contemporary about this doll. Nor was there ever; the ultimate Fifties Stepford wife meets Jayne Mansfield, she was an anchronistic triumph of toy creationism from the start. Launched in 1959 on the cusp of a social revolution in which women would be given the same freedom as men, Barbie is so repelled by sex that she can't even run to nipples.

Nippleless breasts aside, there are other anatomical defects. Detailed research has been carried out to ascertain precisely what that anatomy would be if scaled to human dimensions: 6ft tall and 39-18-33? 6ft5in and 32-24-33? 7ft tall, 44-17-40? No one can agree, which proves that the only thing more ludicrous than Barbie's body is a “serious study” devoted to debunking it. One fact on which the serious studies have reached consensus however, is that Barbie, were she human, would be unable to stand up. Aha, the ultimate male fantasy. Except that men, on the whole, are not Barbie's core customer; malleable four to nine-year-olds are. Hence years of handwringing about her pernicious influence. Here is just a smidgeon: Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference; The Wonder of Barbie: Pop Culture and the Making of Female Identity; Does Barbie Make Girls Want to be Thin?; The Effect of Experimental Exposure to Images of Dolls on the Body Image of 5 to 8-year-old-Girls. She has been castigated by Vladimir Putin, reviled by Naomi Wolf and banned in Iran and Saudia Arabia.

All of which has had the disconcerting effect of making her almost cool. Given the runaway success of the kooky, bendy, much cooler and defiantly un-hourglass Bratz dolls in recent years, Mattel probably cracks open the champagne every time a dictator denounces her.

Yet it seems glaringly obvious that rather than dedicating another research grant to the deleterious power of Barbie on four to nine-year-olds, the vast majority of whom do not end up wanting to look like a pneumatically distorted lump of plastic, universities should channel their funds into examining her deleterious power over 49-year-old women. This is the age of Sarah Burge, a British mother of three who has spent £500,000 making herself look like Barbie's twin (or, if you're of an uncharitable nature, like Ken in drag). Mrs Burge is intensely relaxed about comparisons between herself and a doll made in China, pointing out that she's become a celebrity because of it: “In Japan they love me. I'm just going with the flow.” She is not quite as big a celebrity (yet) as the British-based Cindy Jackson, a fiftysomething (or a thousandsomething, who can say?) coalminer's granddaughter from Kentucky whose autobiography is entitled Living Doll. Her hobbies include having eyelifts, nose jobs, cheek implant, lip enhancement, chin reductions, facelifts, liposuction, fillers, dermabrasion ....

As recently as 2002, one might have filed these two under “Loveable But Isolated Loons”. However, the availability of affordable cosmetic surgery combined with WAG culture, a buoyant economy (RIP), publicity-desperate celebrities and the rapid absorption into the mainstream of porn aesthetics, meant that in the past decade, human - or rather female - evolution has gone into overdrive. What once seemed vaguely freakish - Posh Spice, Donatella Versace - has become familiar to the point where, while not exactly normal in most circles, it has long ceased to shock. Witness Jessica Simpson, Pamela Anderson, Alex Curran, Jordan, Jennifer Ellison, Carmen Electra, Victoria Silvstedt .... Entire careers are forged out of having breast implants, removing breast implants, putting them back in, crying a bit and then getting rid of them again. In as far as this represents an inclusive job-creation scheme and, arguably, a democratisation of beauty, this could be seen as a step forward for womankind - just not from where most of us stand, unless we've been Barbie-tised and have to sit down all the time. But at least most four to nine-year-olds know that the best fun to be had with Barbie is to dye her hair hideous colours, cut it all off until she looks really ugly, then decapitate her.

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