Don't smoke 'em if you got 'em: Barbie meets 'Madmen'

After the retro-cool threads that launched last year at Brooks Brothers and Banana Republic, I might've gone for fancy bar ware as the second licensing extension of cable TV's critical darling and Emmy-winning drama, Mad Men. But, we get Barbie dolls instead. At $75 a pop, I would have at least expected them to come with their own martini glasses, packs of smokes and bottles of aspirin. Anyway, thanks to a deal between toy behemoth Mattel, the show's producer Lionsgate and cable net AMC, we'll have the porcelain-like collector versions of Don Draper, his since-strayed wife Betty, caddish ad man Roger Sterling and fan favorite Joan Holloway on shelves this summer. The latter doll, by the way, seems to have been on the supermodel diet. Guess there's just one mold, but as actress Christina Hendricks has shown (most recently on the cover of New York magazine), she's already broken it. Too bad the Mattel figure doesn't have her womanly shape. Look for the dolls, in all their early 1960s couture glamour, wherever expensive and unnecessary things are sold.

—Posted by T.L. Stanley