Barbie: The Exhibition opens at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow on Saturday, bringing the doll’s history to Scotland for the first time. More than 150 Barbie dolls and related objects will be on show, ranging from a rare hand-painted first edition to recent inclusive versions of the toy.

The timing gives the exhibition an easy hook: visitors can see it the moment it opens, and the display is pitched to people who grew up with Barbie as well as younger audiences drawn in by the recent film. Jane Rowlands said there are people who will remember inventing their own Barbie world as children, but that the exhibition also reaches a newer crowd, and that over several generations there has been something for everyone, from fashion to design to cultural history.

The show runs through Barbie’s story from 1959 to the present day, and the objects on display make that sweep tangible. Alongside the first black, Hispanic and Asian versions of the doll are rare Barbie Dreamhouses and accessories, two examples of 1992’s Totally Hair Barbie, a 1971 Sunset Malibu Barbie and a 1985 Day to Night Barbie. A section on Ken traces how he has changed since his debut in 1961.

That breadth is part of what gives the exhibition its pull, but it also reveals why Barbie still draws debate as much as affection. The display presents the doll as a design object shaped with intent, while also acknowledging the cultural force that pushed Barbie into different roles, bodies and identities over time. The first Barbie with Down’s Syndrome and the first Barbie in a wheelchair sit inside that history, not beside it, and the result is an exhibition that is as much about how the toy adapted as what it represented.

Glasgow Life is presenting the show in partnership with the Design Museum in London and Mattel, and its run until October 18 gives the city a limited window to see the collection together. For Glasgow, the immediate draw is nostalgia; the larger story is that Barbie’s design legacy is now being framed in Scotland as a piece of cultural history, not just childhood memory.