Kim Kardashian has arrived in Paris for her Balenciaga fitting. The SKIMS mogul went braless in a neon pink body-hugging ...

'Barbie' is the talk of cinema, but a Spartanburg, SC, woman was Barbie's fashion designer long before the movie came to be. Meet Kitty Black Perkins.

Black Perkins rose from assistant designer for Barbie in 1976 to chief designer in the mid-’80s. As the middle sibling of seven, the young seamstress got her fashion sense from her father ...

Black Barbie celebrates the momentous impact three Black women at Mattel had on the evolution of the Barbie brand as we know it," read a description from Netflix attached to the trailer.

The first Black Barbie, which debuted in 1980, featured a doll fully immersed in her identity. Designed by Kitty Black Perkins, the doll had an Afro to complement her red dress and gold jewelry.

Mattel did introduce Black fashion dolls in the late 1960s, but they were not named Barbie, and they were marketed as Barbie's friends. So the arrival of a true Black Barbie was an important moment.

Notably, the designer for the 40th anniversary collectible Black Barbie was white. Since the blockbuster’s release, Mattel announced that Perkins will return to help design a 45th anniversary doll.

Black Perkins took inspiration from Diana Ross and fashion designer Bob Mackie’s avant-garde creations and considered her own preferences. Black Perkins liked red, the color of Black Barbie’s ...

For more than four decades, Lagueria Davis’s aunt, Beulah Mae Mitchell, worked at Mattel. Davis, the director of the new Netflix documentary “Black Barbie,” was not a fan of dolls, but was ...

"Black Barbie" director Lagueria Davis and Kitty Black Perkins, designer of the first Black Barbie, discuss the legacy of the doll and her cultural impact.

Barbie was a a firefighter, a teacher, an actor, a lifeguard, a doctor. But it wasn’t until 1976, when Kitty Black Perkins joined the brand as Chief Designer of Fashion Doll concepts, that ...

Black Barbie collector Elizabeth Williams shares a photo of her Maya Angelou doll from Mattel's Inspiring Women Series. Courtesy Elizabeth Wilson “I didn’t have a lot of that in my childhood.