There Is No Escape From ‘Barbiecore’ This Summer

In July 2023, Barbie, the next film from Academy Award-nominated director Greta Gerwig, is scheduled to hit theaters. A year out from its release date, the movie, which stars Margot Robbie as the iconic plastic doll and Ryan Gosling as her loyal paramour Ken, is already generating reams of online buzz due to paparazzi shots of its costumed stars on the job.

You’d have to be living under a rock to avoid the pictures: Robbie and Gosling in pink, fringed cowboy attire, complete with drawstring bell-bottoms and pure white Stetsons. Robbie sporting extra-long blond extensions. Gosling looking like country-and-western Elvis.

The getups, which are rumored to have been designed by past Gerwig collaborator Jacqueline Durran, are unhinged, and nobody seems to be able to shut up about Barbie’s hysterical-neon ensembles. In one shot, Robbie and Gosling can be seen clad in homages to 1995’s Hot Skatin’ Barbie: hot-pink biker shorts, fluorescent patterned vests, and highlighter-colored roller blades topped off with retro visors.

“The Day-to-Night Barbies of the late ’80s and into the early ’90s struck me as being really fascinating,” M.G. Lord, a USC professor and the author of Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, told The Daily Beast. “They reflect the fact that so many women were working in the 1980s. Everything was fuchsia. I mean, just get used to fuchsia and lime green. [Barbie’s] performing this really exaggerated femininity to compensate for the fact that she has this ‘masculine’ identity by day. And there were still these polarized gender identities in the ’90s. There was a recognized binary.”

Even before on-set Barbie photos began to leak, officially sanctioned snapshots of cast members in character were making waves: the first image of Ryan Gosling clad in campy, Calvin Klein-inspired, Ken-branded underwear triggered a torrent of memes, and in April, our first glimpse of Margot Robbie as the titular character kicked off the enthusiasm that’s snowballed into a borderline feeding frenzy.

Despite the fact that the Barbie movie’s actual plot is still a closely guarded secret, a Barbie-inspired aesthetic fever already seems to be trickling out into the real world—and even has a name, “Barbiecore.”

On the high-end side of things, Valentino’s Autumn/Winter 2022 show was packed with wall-to-wall Barbie-pink pantsuits, minidresses and accessories; Anne Hathaway wore a Barbiecore ensemble to the Cannes film festival, and Gigi Hadid and Ariana Grande have also lately been spotted in fuchsia Valentino looks.

This year, Balmain linked up with Barbie for a limited edition collection-slash-NFT release. Lower-priced, pastel-hued Barbie options from ASOS and FUNBOY x BARBIE™ are also on trend.

On the celebrity front, the Kardashians have always aimed for doll-like perfection, but for her birthday party last week, Khloe Kardashian paired an all-pink ensemble with flowing blonde locks, unmistakably paying homage to the original Barbie Girl.

On Tuesday, a Vogue UK headline boldly declared hot couple Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly the “Real-Life Barbie and Ken.” Fox, clad in a pink skirt and bra combo and rocking a pink-blonde wig, certainly looked the part at her musician fiancé’s Hulu documentary premiere, but to our knowledge, Ken’s never gotten a tattoo of the anarchy symbol on his stomach. (No offense MGK, I love you, etc.)

After his show at Madison Square Garden this week, MGK also smashed a champagne glass on his face while performing at an afterparty, something we’re pretty sure Ken has never done. In fact, if Ken were ever photographed bleeding profusely from a self-inflicted head wound, Mattel would probably go bankrupt.

Why do we still care so much about Barbie, for so long deemed a regressive image of womanhood, and why is her aesthetic—as soon to be seen and delighted in on the big screen—so enduringly sticky? Working for Mattel, designer Carol Spencer helped to create Barbie’s fashion looks from 1963 until her retirement in 1998. Spencer, who’ll celebrate her 90th birthday this year, even signs her emails “Barbie love, Carol.”

“The designers were responsible for meeting the criteria that [Barbie inventor] Ruth Handler had established,” Spencer told The Daily Beast. “To be understandable to a child there must be play value, and fashion-wise, it had to be right on, where a child would understand it. We had magazines, we researched French couture, and had to figure out what would be appealing to a child 18 months hence, because that’s when it would actually hit the market.”

There you have the formula: simplicity plus diligent market research equals enduringly memorable outfits. “You know, my house is decorated in shades of off-white and pale blue,” Spencer added, “because I’d come home and have to rest my eyes from all the pink.”

Fashion fads come and go, but since March 9, 1959, Barbie’s official “birthday” (she’s a Pisces), the iconic doll has maintained a steady grip on our cultural consciousness. Barbie made it into space four years before NASA actually put a man on the moon. Nicki Minaj super-fans have long called themselves Barbz, a riff on the rapper’s “Harajuku Barbie” nickname. And who can forget that infernal pop song?

Barbie’s covetable, shapely figure was inspired by Lilli, an adult novelty toy fashioned after a popular sex worker character in a German newspaper cartoon, but Barbie’s presence in both the professional and domestic world has served as a funhouse reflection of the shifting positions women occupy in American culture.

Barbie was originally conceived as an instructional tool for young, unsocialized girls that would provide them with examples of how to appear and behave in middle class society. As the doll’s popularity grew, a cast of friends and of course her boyfriend, Ken, sprung up around Barbie, but it was never intended that Barbie would age, accumulate real responsibilities or start a family. The doll has a kaleidoscope of jobs, but no coworkers. She enjoys endless leisure activities, but paying off the mortgage on her Dream House is never discussed.

In other words, Barbie represents limitless, consequence-free possibility, and her gargantuan closet is crucial to communicating the message that any and every way of life is possible.

“Starting in the ’70s, with the Get Up and Go line, I designed a Barbie surgeon,” Spencer said. “That was when the National Organization for Women movement was going on, and we were all putting women forward and trying hard to introduce something to the Barbie line that would give children an opportunity to research their future in a way that was understandable to them.”

Thus, when we see movie stars decked out like the dolls we played with as children, the feelings we experience are powerfully complex. “The reason why it’s so tender is because we’re remembering a much more innocent time,” Lord said.

Despite the passive female stereotypes her critics felt she conjured, “Barbie has always represented that a woman has choices,” Barbie inventor Ruth Handler once said. Increasingly, with the dismantling of Roe v. Wade and the threat of other regressive rollbacks on the horizon, real women do not.

But in movies, as in the Barbie universe, anything can happen.

“I look at the Barbie movie as probably written like some of the other comic hero movies,” Spencer said. “I don’t know what part of the nostalgia is going to come up. We always had a policy of secrecy at Mattel, and that’s pretty much what’s happening with this Barbie movie. But I can’t wait for the movie to come out, I’m really excited.”