Why this adult man owns over 12,000 Barbie Dolls

How many adult men have you seen playing with Barbie dolls? I bet, not many. Probably, none.

Let alone men, even women, unless they have young children, rarely engage themselves in doll play.

But in Singapore lives an adult man who just cannot get enough of Barbie dolls as he is just obsessed with them. His name is Jian Yang, a 44-year-old who owns more than 12000 Barbie dolls.

Yang is not some typical toy collector, he actually plays with the dolls, travels with them, and even makes clothes for his dolls out of things like toilet paper.

Fascinating, right?

But why on earth this man loves Barbies so much?

He Spent Around £350,000 on Barbie Dolls
Yang’s love for Barbie dolls has its root in his childhood.

In 1984, at the age of 5, he found a Great Shape Barbie under the Christmas tree (which was actually intended for his sister). However, little Yang loved it and laid claim to the toy. Thus his lifelong obsession with Barbie dolls began.

Since childhood, Yang played with so many different toys including transformers, star wars toys and others (he has 500 Transformers and tons of other toys from the 80s and 90s). But Barbie dolls somehow stayed relevant to him.

“I just had Barbies as a child and as an adult, I just never outgrew them,” Yang explained in an interview with The Morning Show.

He now owns more than 12,000 Barbie dolls, costing him around 350,000 pounds. That’s an insane amount of money to spend on dolls, especially when you’re an adult man.

But Yang just cannot help buying the dolls he likes.

“My mind works on a 1:6 scale, which means that every time I’m out shopping or in tourist souvenir shops or wherever it is if I find anything that’s almost doll-sized, I actually buy it,” Yang said.

A Boy Who Never Stopped Playing with Dolls
You might be wondering, what does Yang do with all those dolls?

Well, the answer is simple; he plays with them.

In his words, “I like to change hairstyles. That’s one of my things. I like to re-dress for occasions.” He says his dolls follow him everywhere.

Understandably, not all of his friends find it okay and many think he’s kind of weird. But Yang says he is quite shameless about it.

Yang‘s Instagram account is almost fully dedicated to Barbie dolls where he uploads Barbie photos on a regular basis.

“I bring them out and take Instagram photos with them. I chuck them into waterfalls, and they go into the pool with me,” he says. ‘That’s how I derive value because to me if you don’t play with a toy, it’s worthless.”

Though Yang said to have one of the largest Barbie dolls collections in the world, he never considers himself a doll collector. He only buys the dolls he finds fascinating or there’re stories behind them.

“I’ve never considered myself a collector. I’m a boy that never stopped playing with my toys,” he explains.

He Makes Barbie Dresses Out of Toilet Paper
Barbie-lover Yang is also a co-owner of an ad agency that takes him on different business trips around the world. As you can imagine, wherever he goes, he takes at least one Barbie with him.

On such a business trip to Sri Lanka in 2017, he developed a new obsession which is — making Barbie dresses out of toilet paper.

He said he was bored in the hotel room, had nothing much to do and then out of boredom came the idea to stick toilet papers on the Barbie he had with him.

So, whipping out tape and scissors from his bag, he created a toilet paper dress for the doll. He took a few photos of the Barbie with toilet paper dress and uploaded them to Instagram.

Interestingly, the photos attracted so many eyeballs which encouraged Yang to continue making toilet paper dresses for the rest of the trip. So he did exactly that and kept uploading the photos using #havetissuewilltravel.

From then on, he never stopped creating toilet paper dresses for his dolls. He now uses a new tag for them which is #flashablefashion.

So far, Yang has been featured in different news sites and magazines all around the globe for his interesting obsession.

Parting Thoughts
Jian Yang is indeed an interesting personality with an unheard of story. He smiles a lot and seems like quite a happy man with his dolls.

He says that having dolls around and playing with them helps him “dull the pain” life offers on a daily basis.

An adult man playing with plastic dolls isn’t a very common picture in the world we live in and that’s why I personally find this story extremely fascinating.

Yang somehow managed to keep his childhood innocence alive in him (which most of us fail to do).