Do you think Barbie’s new looks will help save Mattel?

With hope to helping small girls her age, nine year old Gianni Graham of Norfolk in Virginia, USA, has started a Barbie Doll collection mission, to collect dolls to donate to homeless girls her age.

The launch of the new range follows two years of declining sales of Barbie dolls around the world as girls increasingly turn to other dolls, electronic toys and tablets. But body type “was only one of the criticisms”, he said.

Kumea Shorter-Gooden, co-author of “Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America”, has said in the past that Barbie has a bigger impact on black girls struggling with messages about skin color and hair.

Gianni is wrapping the Barbie doll boxes in pink paper and writing “encouragement notes” which say things like, “I hope this brings you joy”, and “This is given to you as a friend”.

Aside from whether Barbie’s looks will ever measure up to society’s changing expectations, another question worth asking is whether kids still want to play with Barbies. Considering that 92-percent of American girls between 3 and 12 have owned a barbie, that’s a huge influence. They are available for order on website shop.mattel.com starting Thursday and will reach stores later. Agbai’s husband’s family is Nigerian, so she found a Nigerian princess doll for her daughter from a line called Queens of Africa.

These girls ended up wanting a thinner body than did girls not exposed to the doll. Signs of change turned up on the recent runways, too, with street-cast women representing a wealth of gloriously relatable shapes and sizes at Vetements, and models like the diminutive Emily Ratajkowski and the buxom blonde Beth Ditto walking at Marc Jacobs. There will be seven new skin tones as well, but the body types are what get the greatest applause from me.

Barbie has gone through many changes since I was a little girl.