Barbie returns to dictate the rules in pop culture. The new trailer of the highly anticipated film by Greta Gerwig with Margot Robbins and Ryan Gosling with the famous MatteL doll at the center has caused Barbie-mania to explode on the net and in the streets.
Is called Barbiecore the trend surrounding the film with a reference to the aesthetics connected to a film (see the Regencycore for Bridgerton) and the hashtag replicated on TikTok millions and millions of times.
Barbie has been a style icon since the 1950s, but Gerwig’s film that brings the doll into the real world promises to up the ante in a feminist key by touching many strings beyond lightheartedness and play. At the center there is always a color: the shocking pink advocated during the spring summer 2023 fashion shows by Pierpaolo Piccioli for Valentino and then by Michael Kors, Versace, Dolce and Gabbana, and then taken on the real red carpets and on Instagram by contemporary style icons such as Rosalia and Kim Kardashian, Gigi Hadid, Florence Pugh, Conan Gray, Billy Porter, Anne Hathaway and Dua Lipa. Kardashian posed in pink like a real-life Barbie in a series of Instagram photos with daughters North and Chicago.
Rosalia had also adopted the Barbie look on vacation with Puerto Rican singer and rapper Rauw. Meanwhile, in the hours immediately following the release of the video clip, lSearches on the net about Barbiecore have doubled, according to Google Trends. Those on the slippers that open the trailer, with their crystal-encrusted stiletto heels and feathered toe, rose by 115 percent, while on shopping app Lyst, the pursuit of items chosen because they were pink rose by 80 percent. It’s not just fashion: Google searches for platinum hair colors like Barbie and Ken’s have skyrocketed three times overnight.
Minutes after the trailer’s release, Isle of Paradise pushed its self-tanning drops in a promotional email that read, “It’s Barbie, and she’s tan.” And it’s not just beauty: Gerwig, who wrote the script with partner Noah Baumbach (Marriage Stories), tells of a doll who leaves Barbieland because of her so-called “imperfections” only to discover along the way that perfection can be found only within itself. Greta comes from Barnard, the ‘female arm’ of Columbia University and the college has launched a campaign among its alumni to let them know on Instagram “what kind of Barbie” they have become.
Meanwhile, Barbie’s costumes, designed by Jacqueline Durran (of Little Women, for which she won an Oscar) are inspiring the street style. But it is certain that Barbie nt has never really gone out in terms of trend: in 2015 Jeremy Scott was inspired by her for a Moschino spring summer collection and the Aqua soundtrack (It’s a Barbie World), while in 2001 Reese Witherspoon, in Legally Blonde, was in fact a Barbie in the gray world of lawyers. (HANDLE).