Barbie isn’t just a doll, she’s a muse. Throughout Barbie’s whirlwind press tour, Margot Robbie has been sporting looks paying homage to the titular doll, walking red—well, often pink—carpets everywhere from Seoul to Mexico City in outfits referencing Barbie dolls of yore, from Day-to-Night Barbie to Earring Magic Barbie and beyond.
The Barbie-inspired looks can be attributed to Robbie’s new stylist, Andrew Mukamal, whom she started working with this year. “We’re finding Barbie references from decades past and just doing it really for the big Barbie fans out there, people who are actually collecting those Barbies. We’re hoping to get them excited,” said Robbie at Barbie’s world premiere in Los Angeles. “We’re pairing Barbie references with great designers.” To prove it, Robbie wore a black custom Schiaparelli haute couture dress to the LA premiere of Barbie. It was a direct nod to Barbie’s Solo in the Spotlight dress from 1960, down to the black gloves, tulle fringe, and pink handkerchief she was delicately holding.
Other top-of-the-line brands that have turned Barbie doll outfits into major Margot Robbie fashion moments include Hervé Léger, Versace, and Valentino. Take a gander at all the Barbie-inspired outfits Robbie has pulled off ahead of Barbie’s release on July 21. As Robbie said herself at the LA premiere, “It’s not subtle, but it’s very fun!”
Growing up as a girl, I played with all sorts of dolls: American Girl, Bratz, Polly Pocket, and of course, Barbies. I had the Dream House, the Dream Car, the color changing mermaid, and don’t forget about Ken. But as I aged, Barbie became a bit more problematic.
Suddenly, we grew up and realized that Barbie wasn’t representing diversity (by any means) very well. She was dimensionally impossible, but she grew up as our role model! How could we spend our lives aspiring for blonde-haired, cinched-waisted, pink-loving Barbie if the girl selling the dream was unattainable?
And then there were the controversial Barbies…1965 Slumber Party Barbie had a scale set to 110 pounds and a dieting book titled “How To Lose Weight” with the advice “Don’t Eat!” Not our role model promoting eating disorder culture!
1965 Slumber Party Barbie
Daily Mail
Mattel was failing to realize that by making Barbie a doctor, lawyer, homeowner, extraordinaire, she truly was our role model as little girls. We were looking at these dolls potentially seeing what our future could look like. And if it meant being 110 pounds to have the Dream Car, that sends the opposite message.
But there is no one I have more faith in than Greta Gerwig to do the injustices of Barbie justice. We have just under one month until Gerwig’s Barbie movie releases into theaters…on the same day as Christopher Nolan’s polar opposite Oppenheimer, which has started its own collection of memes for a double-header day.
Barbie has already stolen the hearts of social media with perhaps the best marketing we’ve seen for a movie in a long time (barring the accidental chaos marketing of Don’t Worry Darling). We’ve gotten picturesque stills of BarbieLand, the Architectural Digest tour of the Dream House, hilarious trailers, and of course the iconic movie posters. The main message of the posters? Barbie (Margot Robbie) is everything, and he’s just Ken (Ryan Gosling).
From the trailer we can tell that Barbie lives in her pink world with other Barbies and Kens, like Dua Lipa being Mermaid Barbie. But one day when Barbie throws her party (complete with synchronized dance and bespoke song), she lets a thought out: “Do you guys ever think about dying?” Party halts.
Now that she’s contempating her mortality, things for Barbie become less than perfect: her heels touch the ground (gag) and she falls off her roof (gasp)..So she’s given a choice: return to her world (presented as a high heel) or go to the Real World and figure out what life’s really about (presented as a worn out Birkenstock). Unfortunately for Barbie, she has to choose the latter.
In BarbieLand, she explains, “ Basically everything men do in your world, women do in ours.” As for the Kens? “I honestly don’t know.” If you can tell the theme of this film so far, it’s that women are running the show.
But what Greta Gerwig gets right with Barbie so far is that BarbieLand is impractical. In the Architectural Digest tour, Margot Robbie shows us how the pool is fake because there are no elements in Barbie’s world. She showers without water, has a fridge filled with decal food, and a lot, she admits with a laugh, is “not super practical, but nothing is for Barbie.”
The success of the movie already is proving to be major. With Ryan Gosling’s fierce dedication to being Ken, you find it hard not to root for this movie in the box office. He’s given us quotes like “If you really cared about Ken, you would know that nobody cared about Ken” and coined the term “Ken-ergy.”
On Jimmy Fallon, Gosling likened Ken to an un-cool accessory, saying that nobody really ever played with a Ken doll. “ I was surprised how…some people were clutching their pearls about my Ken, as though they ever thought about Ken for a second. They never played with Ken! Nobody ever plays with Ken.”
And we’ve already seen the blazing hot pink merchandise that has scattered stores. You can buy Barbie-inspired satin pillowcases, Barbie glassware, Barbie cookware. Our lives are suddenly immersed in our picturesque Barbie DreamWorld, but this time with a grown-up twist.
We’re no longer emulating the Barbie look, per-se…but the Barbie Dream. It’s about female empowerment and uplifting others, becoming successful in your own way, and loving the color pink always. It’s more of the Barbie mindset than the Barbie body.
With a star-studded cast consisting of Will Ferrell, Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu, Emma Mackey, Kate McKinnon, and more…and an equally studded soundtrack with features from Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice, Dua Lipa, Ava Max, Charli XCX, Khalid, Lizzo, etc. This movie radiates power.
As a lover of all things pink, I’m here for the Barbie collabs. Here are my faves to get you ready for the movie of the summer:
Schumer was set to play the iconic doll in a project that Sony Pictures had the rights to back in 2016, Variety reported. She later cited “scheduling conflicts” as her reason for dropping out of the film months later.
The comedian, in an interview on “Watch What Happens Live” with Andy Cohen on Thursday, said the upcoming film that now stars Margot Robbie “looks awesome” before describing the reason she left the earlier project.
“It really was just creative differences but you know, there’s a new team behind it and it looks like it’s very feminist and cool so I will be seeing the movie,” Schumer said.
“Was it that it didn’t feel feminist and cool when you were involved in it?” Cohen asked.
“They definitely didn’t want to do it the way I wanted to do it, the only way I was interested in doing it,” Schumer said.
Schumer’s script saw Barbie as an inventor and the studio requested her invention be a high heel crafted from Jell-O. She then received a pair of Manolo Blahniks “to celebrate,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
“The idea that that’s just what every woman must want, right there, I should have gone, ‘You’ve got the wrong gal,’” she said.
Warner Bros. would later take on the rights to “Barbie” in 2018 while Robbie, who also serves as a producer on the film, was confirmed for the title role the next year.
The Greta Gerwig-directed “Barbie” film looks to hit theaters on July 21.
As the Summer of Barbie kicks into high gear, it’s only right that the film should be matched by an indelible soundtrack (perhaps not since Promising Young Woman has so much thought and care been put into a movie’s accompanying pop song landscape). Leading up that album is Dua Lipa (who also appears in the movie as “Mermaid Barbie”) with the single “Dance the Night,” a major improvement from her so-called summer anthem of 2022, “Potion.” Teaming with Caroline Ailin again (the pair previously co-wrote “New Rules,” “Don’t Start Now,” “Pretty Please” and “Fever” together), Lipa gets some production help from Mark Ronson (who scored the soundtrack and actually DM’d Lipa to get her involved with the project), Andrew Wyatt (also in charge of the score) and the Picard Brothers for a 70s-infused feel that matches the visuals of the video (both sartorially and set design-wise).
Favoring a “filming the video within the video” structure (à la Britney Spears in “[You Drive Me] Crazy”—which was a soundtrack single as well), we open on Lipa being escorted into a sound stage and getting quickly bombarded with the frenetic energy of the set as she’s told there’s some new choreography she has to learn (again, how very Britney while making the video for “[You Drive Me] Crazy,” as she said at the mention of new dance moves to be incorporated, “I’ve just got so much choreography on my head right now”). Lipa is only too ready to oblige the request as she proceeds to start practicing the new moves—shots that are intercut before we see Lipa telling her choreographer, “God, I love that” before the giant disco ball set piece abruptly comes crashing to the ground (an unfortunate snafu that will come full-circle at the end when Barbie director Greta Gerwig makes a cameo). Thus, not an auspicious start. But, as Lipa says in “Dance the Night, “Don’t give a damn/When the night’s here I don’t do tears/Baby no chance I could dance, I could dance, I could dance/Watch me, dance/Dance the night away.” And that’s just what we’re about to watch her do—albeit in the daylight hours, and within the setting of a carefully-curated, hyper-manipulated “dance floor.”
When we aren’t seeing her on the stair-filled stage, there are shots of her in her dressing room (this, instead, echoing Britney’s “Circus” video, complete with all the close-ups on perfume bottles). But the walls of that dressing room quickly come tumbling down—literally—as we’re then shown Lipa among a backdrop with nothing more than a bright klieg light behind her as she proceeds to dance in conjunction with backup dancers wielding clear plastic umbrellas before her perfume bottles seemingly come to life in the form of dancers dressed up as, well, perfume bottles. Elements of the “dressing room set” reappear in the form of multiple clothing racks packed to the gills with all manner of pink and gold sequined frocks as Lipa dances in the center while her dancers move them deftly in a circle around her.
The outline of Mattel’s signature, many-pointed logo then transitions us into seeing a bevy of Lipas walk through a hall of bulb-lit mirrors (in fact, it reminds one of a similar scene in the Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be” video). Except they’re not really mirrors, so much as glassless rectangular metal bars that are the perfect size for walking through. Lipa is then joined by other dancers dressed in the same metallic pink halter top and blue mini skirt before she ascends the staircase with the (newly-replaced) disco ball at the center.
This is a world of make-believe, and we’re given that sense repeatedly as the fantastical set pieces keep coming (including two giant makeup palettes for the background behind the disco ball). In some respects, the stairs also channel the vibe of the set for “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (something Margot Robbie would also riff on as Harley Quinn in Birds of Prey). It’s around the one-minute, ten-second mark that scenes of the Barbie movie itself start to get interspersed. Specifically, parallel dancing moments of Barbie and co. as they party on a similar set. As Barbie states to Ken in the trailer of such an evening, “I don’t have anything big planned, just a giant blowout party with all the Barbies and planned choreography and a bespoke song.” One imagines that, when the time finally does arrive to see that scene in all its splendor, the “bespoke song” has to be none other than Lipa’s “Dance the Night” (and, if not, that might be a terrible mistake).
As the video continues, Lipa takes a brief pause to watch her presumed director scream and extend her hands out to the disco ball she sees crashing to the ground, likely watching it happen in slow motion from her helpless vantage point. As everything around her (including the disco ball) seems to freeze, Lipa keeps dancing, adhering to the casually cold lyrics, “Watch me, dance/Dance the night away/My heart could be burning, but you won’t see it on my face/Watch me, dance/Dance the night away/I’ll still keep the party running, not one hair out of place/Lately I’ve been moving close to the edge/Still be looking my best/I stay on the beat/You can count on me/I ain’t missing no steps.” No, she certainly isn’t. For that’s what it is to be a “Barbie Girl” (a.k.a. a woman in general)—you’ve got to be perfect, unflappable and always “on,” no matter what’s really going on behind those seemingly dead eyes of yours.
In many ways, that’s the purpose of this song: to remind that, beneath the glossy veneer many women exude for the sake of making others (read: men) feel good about themselves, there’s so much involved in appearing so “effortless.” And yes, Lipa embodies such effortlessness in sentiments like, “Baby you can Find me under the lights/Diamonds under my eyes/Turn the rhythm up/Don’t you wanna just come along for the ride?/Oh my outfit so tight.” The Britney influence is evident on this verse, too, for she expressed something tantamount on “Brave New Girl” when she sang, “He said, ‘Let’s get a room girl, come and ride with me’” and “She wants the good life, no need to rewind/She needs to really, really find what she wants/She lands on both feet, won’t take a back seat.” Indeed, one can’t help but think that Spears would have been an ideal choice to create a song for the Barbie Soundtrack, her own aesthetic and discography a long-standing homage to “Barbie World.” Alas, as the movie would suggest, such a “shiny, plastic” existence is so often betrayed by a sinister undercurrent—something Spears knows only too well.
The final pièce de résistance in set pieces (apart from a huge Playboy-esque “boudoir” heel) comes in the form of a Barbie convertible that gets split in half as the camera “goes through it” before we see Lipa sitting in her own pink car (the same one Robbie sits in for a promotional still of the movie). We then cut to a scene of her strutting through the set with a slew of human disco balls behind her. The disco ball motif, in case you couldn’t tell by now, is very important. For, as Taylor Swift’s “mirrorball” made clear, this ostensible emblem of good times merely reflects back what everyone else wants to see. Images of Barbie are also conjured when Swift sings, “I’m a mirrorball/I can change everything about me to fit in…/The masquerade revelers/Drunk as they watch my shattered edges glisten.”
Nonetheless, as Lipa puts it, “That’s the moment I shine/‘Cause every romance/Shakes and it bends/Don’t give a damn.” And how could any Barbie when she looks this good as the music keeps playing? Which is why one just hates to think of the unpleasant thoughts that might creep in if it ever stops.
Ever since the new Barbie movie starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling was announced, Barbiecore has been everywhere. When the trailer was released in April 2023, the surge of interest in all things pink was only renewed in both the fashion and home categories.
Fortunately, pink is one of the easiest colors to decorate with. Whether you just want to incorporate a hint of this hue into your decor scheme or you’re ready to go all out and create your own version of Barbie’s Dream House, here are ten Barbiecore must haves for the home.
Housewife Essentials Party Girls
Housewife Essentials Party Girl
Housewife Essentials
What’s more Barbiecore than a gorgeous photo of a real Barbie doll extra glammed up? This photo series from Housewife Essentials is fun yet sophisticated. With a choice of various Barbie dolls with different hair and skin colors, posed perfectly and presented in a white lacquer frame—these prints are available in both small and large sizes. The hard part is choosing just one (or two or three) to hang.
Ruggable Pink Ombre Rug
Ruggable Pink Ombre Rug
Ruggable
Want to add a fun pop of color to any room? Ruggable recently launched a line of Barbie-inspired rugs featuring designs from popping geometric shapes to this cheerful ombre print. Best of all, these rugs are washable and stain-resistant, making them ideal for homes with pets and children. While they look fabulous in a living room or perhaps a bedroom, the colorful and bold styles truly breathe new life into a black, white, or even navy dining room.
Venus Et Fleur Fleura Porcelain Vase
Venus Et Fleur Fleura Porcelain Vase
Venus Et Fleur
Just like Barbie, Venus Et Fleur’s eternity flowers truly stand the test of time. With fun and feminine floral options, this vase of eternity flowers just adds something extra to a mantle, table, or even a nightstand. While it’s impossible to go wrong with classic roses, these mixed hydrangeas feature several shades of pink blooms in a chic white porcelain vase. Better yet, they last for at least a year.
ArtSugar Super Pink Sprinkle Pop
ArtSugar Super Pink Sprinkle Pop
ArtSugar
Barbie would definitely have this cool ice cream sculpture by Betsy Enzensberger somewhere in her dream house. Made of resin, ink, and pine, it’s a unique way to elevate a side table, shelf, or even a nightstand. While it’s calorie-free, it certainly doesn’t lack style. Who said Barbie never had dessert?
Mustard Made Lockers
Mustard Made Lockers
Mustard Made
Lock in a dose of Barbiecore with these fabulous pink lockers from Mustard Made. A truly unique way to add storage to a hallway, girl’s or teenager’s room, office or a she-shed, blush and berry hues are available in several sizes. These lockers are also an instant solution to a room that lacks closet space.
Barbie X Dragon Glassware Wine Glasses
Dragon Glassware X Barbie
Dragon Glassware
Whether you’re drinking rosé or chardonnay, says cheers Barbie-style with these wine glasses from Dragon Glassware. Each set includes a magenta glass and a pink glass. After all, Barbie loves a party. It also makes a great gift for any Barbie fan.
Blissy Pink Pillowcases
Blissy Pink Pillowcases
Blissy
Want a subtle pop of Barbiecore in the bedroom? Blissy Pink Silk Pillowcases are the perfect way to do it. Made of high-quality 22-Momme 100 percent Pure Mulberry Silk, this pillowcase is stylish and machine-washable. Sleeping on a silk pillowcase also helps the skin and hair retain moisture. Choose from standard, queen, and king sizes.
Milton and King Check Wallpaper In Pink
Milton and King Check Wallpaper In Pink
Milton and King
This pink check wallpaper has both farmhouse and Barbiecore vibes. Ideal for someone who likes Barbiecore but has a more traditional home—the classic gingham print is exceptionally versatile. It can be used in a kitchen to breathe new life into a breakfast nook, or just bring some color into a home office or bedroom. This pattern can be used for an entire room or even just an accent wall.
Villeroy & Boch Boston Collection Bowls
Villeroy & Boch Boston Collection
Villeroy & Boch
Bring a sweet pop of pink to any tablescape with these gorgeous dessert bowls from Villeroy & Boch. Made from crystal glass, the dishwasher-safe serving pieces are ideal for serving everything from ice cream to fresh berries or even just leaving out on a coffee table as a candy dish. Even when the Barbiecore trend finally fades, the timeless style of these bowls will look beautiful on any table for years to come.
KitchenAid Artisan Series Stand Mixer in Rose
KitchenAid Artisan Series Stand Mixer in Rose
Bed Bath and Beyond
The kitchen is the perfect place to add in a pop of pink. So why not leave this useful appliance out on your countertop? This KitchenAid Artisan Series Stand Mixer in Rose has teen speeds and can knead, mix, and whip ingredients together. It even includes a flat beater, dough hook, wire whip, and pouring shield.
Of all the things about the latest round of the Barbie marketing blitzkrieg, perhaps the most standout element to the (feminine) masses was the tagline touting, “She’s everything. He’s just Ken.” This with Barbie (Margot Robbie) presented in the top “hole” of the B and Ken (Ryan Gosling) rightly situated “on bottom.” With five simple words, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach (the Joan Didion [a fellow Sacramentan like Gerwig] and John Gregory Dunne of our time) have cut to the core of flipping the script on a societal viewpoint that’s typically directed at men…who see women as “background.” So often foolishly believing they’re the “stars” of the show with “old chestnuts” like, “Behind every great man is a great woman.” This horrific back-handed “compliment” of a saying serving only to reiterate that women’s reproductive and emotional labor is not only meant to be “invisible,” but it’s also expected. Simply “goes with the territory” of being a woman.
With the advent of the so-called Equal Pay Act in 1963 (just in the U.S., mind you), women were essentially told, “You can be ‘equal’ to men in the productive labor sphere, too—so long as you keep performing the same reproductive labor at home.” For to be a woman is to take on the burden of everything silently and with a smile. Perhaps that’s why it’s no coincidence that, just a few years earlier, Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler, was incited to create a different kind of doll after witnessing her daughter play with the available toys for girls at the time, compared to those available for boys. The idea behind Barbie (named in honor of Ruth’s daughter, Barbara) thus arose from wanting to give girls the opportunity to envision their futures through lenses beyond just “mother” or “homemaker.”
Barbie was the first doll of its kind, encouraging women to imagine the possibilities of their gender beyond the clearly-defined role of “supporting act” to the presumed man in her life. As such, a year before the Equal Pay Act, Mattel released Barbie’s first Dreamhouse—the assumption being that she actually might have paid for it herself (Ken had only entered the picture a year before, in 1961)…even if this was still before a woman was “allowed” to open her own bank account. Chillin’ at the crib by herself, Barbie served as a catalyst for the idea that a woman could actually buy a home of her own one day, without the presence of a man to sully it. Or, if he did, at least she could tell him to get the fuck out.
Barbie’s undercutting feminist revolution continued in 1965, with the release of Astronaut Barbie, effectively proving that she, a woman, made it to the moon four years before Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. Then, Mattel (with Ruth at the Barbie helm) got really progressive in 1968 by “daring” to introduce Christie, the first Black doll, and a purported friend of Barbie’s…which would technically make her an OG of allyship (apart from Marilyn Monroe), but let’s not make this any more about white women than it always is. Another major overhaul on the potential for what a woman “could” be occurred in 1985, with CEO Barbie (a true testament to the total embracement of capitalism-on-steroids under Reagan). The first of her kind to really show that a woman was able to “have it all.” But, again, the unspoken caveat here is that she’s still expected to carry out her “inherent duties” as a woman. This pertaining to the reproductive labor associated with household management and childcare.
In Alva Gotby’s They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life, she gets to the heart of this double standard by noting, “Women’s labor, especially that which is sexual or maternal, is conflated with their bodies and constructed as a natural instinct. This naturalization is essential for the capitalist use of reproductive labor. The capacity for reproductive labor is turned into a natural quality of certain bodies whose function is primarily to carry out that labor. If it is not work, it is worthless economically, but also natural and therefore good.” This is part of the reason Barbie’s various “personae” have been fractured into so many “professions,” all while still maintaining her plastered-on smile and ostensibly “personable” aura (read: looking like the classic male ideal of what a female should “be”). All of which is expected of a “good” woman. “The naturalization of feminized labor, and particularly emotional labor,” Gotby adds, “not only makes that work appear as unskilled labor but also makes it invisible as labor. It is merely an eternal and unchangeable quality of feminine personalities… Women’s emotional labor is seen as a natural expression of their spontaneous feeling, something that is in turn used to further exploit this work.” I.e., touting that women “can have it all” while Ken sits back and actually does fuck-all.
Hence, “He’s just Ken.” He gets a gold star just for being there. Whereas women have to work twice as hard in every facet of life to be taken “seriously.” Which is where the matter of women’s appearance comes into play. On the one hand, if a woman is “hot,” like Barbie, the snap judgment that will be made about her is that she must not be very smart. On the flipside, a woman won’t be considered for much of anything at all if she doesn’t put some “effort” into cultivating a “pleasant” appearance. Barbie reinforces this trope for sure. She’s “visually pleasing,” but she can also embody everything from eye doctor Barbie to smoothie bar worker Barbie, transitioning from white to blue collar work as effortlessly as Pete Davidson transitions from one high-profile girlfriend to another.
So yes, “She’s everything. He’s just Ken” has never felt more resonant as a much-needed spotlight on the continued manner in which women are expected to be literally everything (particularly a hybrid of mother/girlfriend) to everyone while men can just show up without putting in any of the excess emotional labor that women have to. They’re just men, after all. Only so much can be expected of “God’s gift.”
Our beloved childhood friend and icon – Barbie – is coming to life. The first teaser trailer of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was released today…and I already feel a surge of tremendous excitement
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Expect a star-studded cast featuring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu, Michael Cera, and Will Ferrell. From there, it’s all up to Greta – the groundbreaking director who gave us stellar films like Ladybird and Little Women.
This romantic comedy has been years in the making. It was originally reported that a Barbie movie was in the works way back in 2009. Then a decade later, we heard that the lovely Margot Robbie would play Barbie…and it wasn’t revealed until 2022 that Ryan Gosling was playing Ken and who the rest of the cast would be. Thankfully, the movie will finally premiere on July 21, 2023 to Barbie lovers and cinema fans the world over.
The teaser reveals a cluster of little girls – wearing old-fashioned pinafores and drab frocks. They’re having a tea party with their baby dolls in the hills and valleys of a vast orange desert. Richard Strauss’ Thus Sprach Zarathustra provides an ominous soundscape. It is one truly creepy mise-en-scène and a clear reference to 2001: Space Odyssey.
Then the monolithic Barbie is revealed. She stands 20-feet tall, towering above the kids and winking cheekily. And the girls go insane – they smash their babydolls’ skulls in, slam themagainst an outcropping of rocks, destroying their once-cherished dollies. And then we flip to the magical, mesmerizing world of Barbie. Thus demonstrating that Gerwig will take this film far beyond our expectations.
Rumors of Dua Lipa’s involvement in the film have started to swirl…after reports that the singer would be in the film months ago, it appears the official Barbie movie Instagram account has followed her in the recent hours. A new beau in Jack Harlow and a film debut? It really is Dua’s world.
This movie’s already inspired the hot pink Barbie-core trend and it’s not even out yet…the cultural impact is about to shift our cosmos. Brace yourselves, it’s about to become Barbie’s world.
