Jian Yang, 33, of Singapore, has one of the largest doll collections in the world. Of the 9,000 dolls he owns, 6,000 of them are Barbies. His obsession started when he was 13 and bought “Great Shape” Barbie, which first came out in 1983 and re-released for Toy Story 3. “Before I knew anything about social norms, I was a boy that watched this on TV, liked it and wasn’t allowed to have one,” he says in a clip from a British reality show. “As I grew older, got my own allowance, that’s where I started getting the freedom to buy whatever I wanted.”
Jian says his collection has hurt his relationships with girlfriends. “I’ve also got the ex-girlfriends who get insecure about this kind of stuff … They look at dolls and go ‘OK, that’s the competition’, which is quite troubling but it’s a reality.”
Smithers probably has that same problem:
He still has nothing on Barbie collector Bettina Dorfman, who holds the Guiness World Record with over 15,000 Barbies. He might overtake her eventually, though, but he needs to stop getting distracted by Bratz.
