Kitty Black Perkins

Kitty Black Perkins has her own ideas about dress-for-success: Make it pink and bouffant, and the more glitter the better. For 14 years, she has been fashion designer to the ultimate material girl, Barbie. And one thing she's learned about the little girls who own all those little dolls is that they think Barbie is pretty in pink. Black Perkins, who is principal designer for Mattel Toys' fashion dolls, works out of a studio in a top-secret design center in El Segundo.

Kitty Black Perkins has her own ideas about dress-for-success: Make it pink and bouffant, and the more glitter the better. For 14 years, she has been fashion designer to the ultimate material girl, Barbie. And one thing she's learned about the little girls who own all those little dolls is that they think Barbie is pretty in pink. Black Perkins, who is principal designer for Mattel Toys' fashion dolls, works out of a studio in a top-secret design center in El Segundo.

If Barbie talked, she would have been gushing Sunday. There she was, on Beverly Hills' Rodeo Drive, diamonds laced around her slender neck, toes tucked into ruby-encrusted slippers, mink stole tossed over her shoulders and a Louis Vuitton bag by her side. Granted, Barbie, who has introduced millions of American girls to the pleasures of consumerism, was visiting the kingdom of retail chic to be auctioned off to the highest bidder as part of a benefit for children's charities.

Barbie, the ageless teen-ager, is 30. She's changed a good deal since she first appeared in a snug zebra-stripe swimsuit in 1959. Now a woman of the 1980s, she drives a sleek red Ferrari and lives in a posh brick townhouse. She's traded her high school letter sweater and megaphone for a business suit and tiny credit cards. It seems that Barbie has grown up along with the baby boomers of the 1950s.