‘Hi Barbie!’ Diving into the fashions of Greta Gerwig’s box office smash hit.
By Fashion Editor Lucrecia Luna Smee
On 21 July 2023, the world was hit by a sea of pink and an irrepressible cacophony of voices from every corner of the globe, chirpily greeting each other with a cheerful “Hi Barbie!”. I, like many others, dressed in my finest pink attire and sashayed my way to the closest cinema with a gaggle of girlfriends. With obscenely priced popcorn and oversized beverage in hand, we were ready for a life changing viewing of Greta Gerwig’s fuchsia fuelled, box-office smash hit Barbie.
Many individuals - okay, me - described the film as “A win for the girls”, or “feminism’s greatest achievement”, and many wondered “how much did Chanel pay for all of this product placement?” (We will get to that one later). The film was at times heart wrenching look into the realities of the modern-day woman, through the perfectly plastic eyes of our protagonist Margot Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie”. The film features a massive ensemble cast of various Barbies and Kens, including Sex Education’s Emma Mackey and Ncuti Gatwa, Transparent’s Hari Nef, Insecure’s Issa Rae, Kate McKinnon of Saturday Night Live fame, and of course, the delightful Ryan Gosling as Robbie’s Ken.
As soon as the trailers and teaser images began to surface for the film, the looks that would be gracing the silver screen were being discussed by the masses, thankfully, to high praise. The perfectly pink Barbie-core aesthetic of the film can all be attributed to one woman, Jacqueline Durran.
An eight-time nominee and two-time Academy Award winner, Durran is a movie industry veteran and has had a very full career. Her previous projects include the likes of 2005’s Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, Anna Karenina, Beauty and the Beast, Spencer, The Batman, as well as Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Little Women, marking this as her second time working with the writer-director.
All this is not to state that costuming Barbie was an easy feat for Durran and her team. They had a mere eleven weeks to prep for the film before shooting began, meaning that it was likely some actors were being sewn into their costumes before being whisked off to set. Speaking to E! News, Durran described dressing Margot Robbie as the hardest part of the project, saying “Margot is just about the most perfect human you can imagine, so she didn't make it hard... what was hard was narrowing down all the options and making sense of all the possible looks we could go for.”
As you can imagine, costuming a doll who changes outfit with every scene change, who must be perfectly attired for each occasion, and matching head to toe, is not exactly a walk in the park. In a conversation with British Vogue’s Amel Mukhtar, Durran expands on this, “You don’t treat Barbie like you treat a regular character because the motivation for what she’s wearing isn’t from within… It’s about being completely dressed for your job or task.” To give structure to a dizzying task, Durran and her team wanted the world to be a somewhat controlled environment and had a “rigorous chart of [about 15 to 20] colour combinations’ which were referred to throughout the process.
“Barbie is always about the ideal,” she goes on to say, “so through the costumes, we give each character a look that reflects the ultimate Barbie look for where she is in the story at that moment. And, of course, in Barbie Land there’s more than one Barbie, so if they’re all going to the same event ‘they’re not in a uniform but they all match each other’.” Speaking to Vanity Fair, Durran reinforced this need for structure; “Barbie could really wear anything. You need some ground rules… one of the ground rules was that [Barbie] would always be perfectly dressed for whatever she was going to do.”
Her inspirations for the film’s costuming came from a large variety of well managed sources. Gerwig’s film features the beach as an ever-important setting, so in Durrans words to Vogue, “Malibu Barbie is Key”. Rather than stitch for stitch, mould for mould, copies of the original dolls, Durran opted to draw from the 1950s and 1960s for a retro twist.
Brigitte Bardot became a staple inspiration for many of Robbie’s looks and hairstyles in the film. The colour combinations I mentioned above were modelled off of the idea of a “French Riviera beach in the early 60s” featuring vibrant summertime pastel trios: “lavender, bright blue, light blue; green, orange, beige; orange, blue, pink; two pinks and a yellow.” Durran was dressing a core cast of upwards of 20 Barbies, all with different jobs, personalities, and situations, and each with their own individual pile of references. Of course, Durran and her team referred heavily to the Mattel archives during their process. For one costume - Hari Nef’s Doctor Barbie - the team had pictures pulled of every single doctor Mattel had created in the past 60 years as inspiration.
The 1980s also became a heavily referenced period for a few reasons. It was the time of Greta Gerwig’s childhood. She had a soft spot for the dolls she would inherit that provided an idealised view of the world – “My mom wasn’t crazy about Barbie,” she told Elle, “it wasn’t something that felt, necessarily, approved, which made it more intriguing.”. For many of the ensembles - notably Barbie and Ken’s roller-skating getup when they first enter the real world - Durran and her team incorporated the flashy neon tones and loudness associated with the era.
On top of this, for Ken, along with stretchy, disco boiler suits and hyper-masculine cowboy attire, colourful 80s sportswear is a key Ken look. Speaking again to Vogue, Durran says of Ken “He is sporty. That’s his main thing. We had buyers in America that went to dealers and imported [vintage sportswear] for us because we needed so much of it.” However, for most aspects of the film Ken was more of an afterthought made to match Barbie as he is, after all, “just Ken”.
Okay, we’ve reached that point in the article, let’s talk about Chanel. Speaking to Vogue on the sourcing of various materials for the film, Durran brings up the importance of Barbie Pink. Pink is not 100 per cent of the Barbie wardrobe but it makes up a large chunk, specifically referring to Margot Robbie’s styling for the film, “anything we didn’t make, it’s pretty much Chanel... they sent us anything and everything we wanted.” The French fashion house were more than happy to provide whatever was requested from the team, from monogrammed purses, colourful jewelled necklaces and brooches to full suits and dresses. “The Barbie Legacy is so intrinsically tied with fashion brands throughout history…” says Margot Robbie in an interview with the fashion house, “and wearing something high fashion definitely feels right for the character.”
Many pieces were archival pieces from the 80s and 90s and were worn down the runway by real-life Barbie doll Claudia Schiffer. Robbie even spoke of a dress she wore on set which still had a small tag on it reading “Claudia”. To pepper in my personal opinion for a moment, although I do think the Chanel pieces in the film fit the aesthetic - many of them, after all, were recreations made at the request of Durran for the film - I found the jarring Chanel logos that were often found in Barbie Land to be the slightest bit ill-fitting. Barely hidden zoom-ins on the monogrammed purses and necklaces at pivotal moments distracted from the plot at times. Unfortunately, it must be done in the name of capitalism.
Jacqueline Durran is an eight-time Academy Award nominee and two-time winner for a reason, and her work on Barbie has proven that yet again. The perfectly coordinated ensemble looks, unnaturally high heels on the feet of each barbie, and perfectly pink bells and whistles found all over Barbie Land, made the visual experience of the film one for the books. The timelessness of the film’s fashions will no doubt aid in the film's longevity, and I would be incredibly surprised if the film does not warrant Durran yet another nomination, if not another win. With all this being said, remember that if you are ever in doubt about what to wear, look to Barbie – she’s probably got an idea for you.
