Real World femininity: The costume designs of Barbie and what can we learn from all that pink?
I need to talk about the Barbie costumes. The ruffles, the matching accessories, the scalloped edges, the pastel hues! To me, the costume design was as close to perfect as anyone could get – which is perhaps fitting for a film centred around ‘Stereotypical Barbie.’ The costumes, and their seamless magical transitions, demonstrate Barbie’s ability to always have the perfect ensemble for every activity and location – and who doesn’t dream of that? – but even so they are not simply superficial aesthetic play. For Margot Robbie’s ‘Stereotypical Barbie’ and many of her co-stars, the clothing also gradually evolves to represent characters’ inner states and their openness and engagement with their surroundings – in fact, exactly how many of us use clothing in our day-to-day lives. It was a wonderful subtle device, but also one that left me trying to unpick what these clothes might be telling us as part of the themes explored in the film (pardon the sewing puns, I can’t help myself).
Of course, many of the costumes are replicas of actual Barbie doll outfits (the palazzo pants! Where do I get some?), which inevitably reflect the eras of their creation. But they also serve to remind us that this is a girl’s world. Pink, the cultural shortcut for girliness in contemporary Western culture, is of course everywhere. The pink gingham dress in which we first encounter Margot Robbie’s Barbie, for example, is a case in point. With its 1950s’ New Look silhouette enhanced with petticoats, it gives us a kind of Sandra Dee wholesome vision of hyper femininity. (Given Ken’s brief moment as black-t-shirt-clad Danny in the dance montage, it’s even more fitting.) Or the pink puff sleeve number with the lovely scalloped collar she wears to venture off into the Real World, again a historic ideal of feminine dressing without a hint of irony about it: it’s pure, and frankly ‘innocent,’ ‘girliness’ in a garment. This style of clothing isn’t without its baggage – it’s significant that these clothes appear so ‘innocent’, linked to a particular idea of femininity (one you’re probably more likely to find in a children’s department today), and that this innocence is fashionable in Barbieland. (Interestingly, I want to note that Weird Barbie – who serves as this universe’s equivalent of Morpheus in The Matrix – wears a voluminous, empire-waisted puff-sleeve dress that could be off the rack in Selfridges today, an example of the way hyper-femininity is being subverted in contemporary fashion. But in Barbieland, she is “weird” and ostracised. Camp reinterpretations of femininity are not the point in Barbieland – at least when we first visit.)
But there’s also a sense of exuberant joy and sparkle in how the Barbies dress – a sense of pure fun that the complications of the Real World often override. This is embodied for example in a sequined jumpsuit in which to dance the night away; even while this garment signals a move away from youthful innocence and more into ‘Seventies-era Studio 54 territory, it is still closely aligned with a stylised kind of femininity – one that lives on in ‘dressing up’ for New Years’ and pop concert wardrobes, or diva-esque larger-than-life style, but does not frequently fit in to day-to-day life as most of us experience it.
Glitter and sparkles have their own flavour of femininity that we don’t tend to take ‘seriously,’ perhaps because of their association with girlish fantasy (it’s an easy leap from glitter to My Little Pony, for example). Yet in Barbieland these are logical, suitable, everyday outfits. Jeans and a t-shirt just wouldn’t look right for a choreographed group dance to a specially-written Dua Lipa song. And even when ‘practical’ workwear does appear (the pink-clad bin woman, the again pink-clad construction women), it’s bright and playful. It's flowery, poufy, delicate, put-together, and pleasant, and in Barbie’s context that seems just right.
It’s in the Real World, though, where Barbie’s style starts to seem campy and out of place, and suddenly she is the weird one: the neon rollerblading outfits, the pink flared cowgirl suit speak to a more sexualized femininity, which of course gets plenty of unwanted attention. We start to see already a questioning of how femininity fits into contemporary life, and what an appropriate (and ‘adult’) way to express it would be.
It’s at this point as well that we first encounter the character of Sasha. The apparent Real World owner of Stereotypical Barbie, the teenager is a jarring foil to the fantasy of the pink-clad adult. Sasha is dressed entirely in black and grey, in an iteration of the classic disaffected teenage uniform of jeans and a hoodie. Whether this is a fair representation of an American teenage girl today is probably not my area of expertise (although in fact it looks like what I wore 20 years ago); however, it is clearly symbolic of ‘attitude’ and the angsty teenage desire to look on the world with negativity and a kind of dark seriousness – not always incorrectly, to be fair. It’s with this foil that a clear dichotomy is set up: the teenage girls set us up to understand what it means – and how it looks – to be serious, thoughtful, and rational. Barbie, in all her hot pink, is the opposite. And as Barbie is set up to be seen as ‘crazy’, immature, unrealistic, and ditsy, we see the way that femininity is often characterised and maligned in a masculinity-dominated culture.
But as Sasha’s journey through Barbieland progresses, her clothing becomes more colourful and more typically “girly”, including the childhood classic bobble hair tie. Perhaps in accessing Barbieland she is re-learning to appreciate some of the trappings of her girlhood, or realizing that being ‘girly’ doesn’t mean being a simplistic airhead; at any rate, her complete rejection of traditional femininity in the Real World is tempered by her engagement with the Barbies and their efforts to restore the balance of female power.
And Stereotypical Barbie herself, as a doll would, continues undergoing wardrobe changes to suit the context. To deal with cleaning up Barbieland and overcoming her own existential crisis, there are pink boiler suits (that’s a yes from me.) As she becomes re-empowered and starts to re-take her rightful place from the Kens I couldn’t help but laugh at the donning of a pink suit and accessories bedecked with the Chanel logo to knock on her/Ken’s door – perhaps canny product placement, but did we also get a brief moment with Selling Sunset Barbie on the way to reclaiming feminine power? (I’ll be honest, not sure it fits with that narrative, but it is certainly one kind of contemporary femininity we see plenty of in pop culture, and maybe she is beating the men at their own game.) Meanwhile, the outfits of Sasha and America Ferrera’s Gloria (the real mastermind behind Existential Crisis Barbie) continue to slowly transform until they become more closely aligned with the original, ‘girly’ aesthetic of Barbieland; we’re invited to draw a parallel here with their coming closer together as mother and daughter, and with finding the power of their own voices and determination in the face of a challenge.
Interestingly, towards the end of the film but while still in Barbieland, the apparent femininity of many of the Barbies’ outfits is softened and modernized. In fact, a large portion of them – Margot Robbie included – appear to be wearing versatile, ready-to-wear dresses from contemporary brand Rixo. There’s something that seems to have happened in the process of needing to recognize the inherent and impossible contradictions of femininity and being a woman: the historicised femininity originally on view in Barbieland is no longer quite right. Instead, we’ve started to enter the world of contemporary fashion, with narrower silhouettes, less structured bodices, and flowy-er fabrics. There is, effectively, a constant questioning of what embracing femininity means – first a kind of blissful ignorance and innocence, then a rude awakening that requires something sturdy to fight in, and then a gradual tempering of attitude that starts to adapt to the complex pressures of self-consciousness and messy relationships with others.
What does this all lead to, and what does it say about femininity in today’s world? Poignantly, the film ends with Barbie participating in one of the most practical and unglamorous activities I can think of associated with womanhood – visiting a gynaecologist (for the record: I’m happy if you disagree and think that this is, in fact, glamorous). Yet it seems that upon entry into the Real World, the trappings of conventional femininity have been left behind. Of course, as Gloria makes abundantly clear, femininity has, can, and should be renegotiated, viewed and expressed in new ways. But I was left wondering, where is the joy, and the playfulness, and really the girlishness? Why does it not have a place in the grown-up Real World? Why is a brown, unstructured blazer and jeans – with an accent of pink found in practical Birkenstocks – the costume of choice for an enlightened existence in the complex emotional world of modern humanity?
Ultimately what I’m saying is: maybe we should also take ruffles and pink gingham a bit more seriously in real life too. There’s no reason to leave behind girlish fun just because we’re grown up, or have had (at least) one existential crisis, or have practical things to do that require sensible flat shoes. If Barbie taught us anything, it’s that there is a lot of power in femininity, and that should be celebrated rather than brushed off as frivolous or unserious.
