Warhol’s Barbie

Art x Fashion Edit #22

At long last, the hyper-pink blockbuster Barbie hit theaters this July. The feminist take on the iconic doll by director Greta Gerwig, is not only a stunning example of all-encompassing marketing, but also an impressive demonstration of repositioning a brand’s image.

Barbie was created by Ruth Handler, founder with her husband, of the toy giant Mattel. Named after her daughter Barbara and inspired by the German doll Bild Lili, Handler aimed at offering an alternative to the baby-dolls teaching little girls to become moms. She created the toy at her image, career-focused, well-dressed, and not necessarily – not to say at all – family-oriented. In Barbie Land, Ken is an accessory.

To put it simply, Barbie is a toy. But she is also so much more than that. In the her more than 60 years of life, she has become an icon of pop culture, sold globally and representing the most profitable product of Mattel’s catalogue. But she has also become the poster child of unattainable, exclusive beauty standards.

Since the 2000s, facing declining sale in its star-product, Mattel has strived to make the doll more inclusive, giving her different skin colors, sizes, hair styles… With more or less success. Experiencing the increasing mismatch between what the doll stood for and the changing societal expectations, Mattel opted for a full overhaul of Barbie’s image, masterfully executed by Greta Gerwig.

From an icon of patriarcal expectations imposed on women, Barbie has been rebranded to a feminist icon made to show women they can be, do, and want anything and everything in life. Barbie was created with no sexual attributes, to not shock the conservative American ideology of the sixties, but today, she can and should be seen and not care about what people think of her.

To illustrate the power of Barbie, what better example than the painting by Andy Warhol, made in 1985. As the perfect intersection of star-icon and epitome of pop culture, it should be no surprise that the artist payed her hommage, showing that Barbie can really be anything: a muse, art, and the embodiment of “department stores becoming museums and museums becoming department stores”.