Oh la la! Barbie and Ken en France

Suddenly on Friday, Barbie and Ken, the plastic Mattel doll icons, started trending on Twitter, becoming one of the most talked-about topics on the microblogging network.

Usually when something trends on Twitter, the reason is pretty obvious. Maybe someone was convicted of murder, or a politician flashed his private parts. But Twitterers were stumped by this one. They noticed the trend—some even jumped on it—but they couldn’t figure out why.

“Barbie and Ken is trending. But Spaceship Atlantis isn’t?” asked @Tacobomb2011.

And then people started tweeting about the plastic couple’s relationship, their apparent pending nuptials, their likeness to celebrity couples, and so on.

But still, nothing answered the question: How did this get started?

A deeper search on Twitter finally revealed the answer.

Twitter, a company based in San Francisco, may seem as American as baseball. But people, this is the World Wide Web. And the beaucoup de tweets about Barbie and Ken? They were emanating from across the pond from the United States, over in France.

“Love how the americans think we’re talking about the real barbie & ken when it’s actually a french thing,” tweeted @clairemarine.

She used a hashtag that gave us a hint: #ss5

The Daily Dot staff got cracking. Daily Dot intrepid intern Jordan Valinsky found the site for the show. Editor Owen Thomas found a few French tweets (he parle the French). Apparently, there’s a French reality TV show, called Secret Story 5, featuring a couple with an uncanny resemblance to the plastic dolls.

So, mystery over. The next question: When do we start seeing bootleg Ken & Barbie clips on YouTube?