Margot Robbie’s Barbie Movie Reveals New Look at Costumes, Convinces Fans About Greta Gerwig’s Love for Being Faithful to Source Material
One of the most eagerly awaited films of the year is Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which is based on the Mattel toy series of the same name and stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. The main theme of the film is Barbie‘s struggle to discover her true calling in the outside world after she is kicked out of Barbieland for being flawed.
Along with Robbie and Gosling, other notable names associated with the project include Ncuti Gatwa, Simu Liu, Issa Rae, Emma Mackey, Nicola Coughlan, Dua Lipa, etc. This has only increased audience expectations. The movie created a real-life Barbieland set that was entirely inspired by the different toy collections and themed Barbies throughout the doll’s history. The new pictures and interview has convinced the fans that the story is going to be authentic and true to the source.
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie to honor the legacy
In a recent interview with Vogue, Barbie’s costume designer Jacqueline Durran shared how she created the hundreds of looks for Greta Gerwig’s hotly anticipated movie starring Margot Robbie. She said, “Barbie really is interlinked with fashion, because how you play with her is by dressing her. Clothes are her method of expression. You don’t treat Barbie like you treat a regular character, because the motivation for what she’s wearing isn’t from within.”
The designer mentioned that she drew inspiration from the 1950s and 1960s Barbie and gave the costumes a retro twist inspired by Brigitte Bardot as a beach-babe idéale. All of the costumes in Barbie Land fit into one of roughly fifteen color combinations, which Durran said were, “lavender, bright blue, light blue; green, orange, beige; orange, blue, pink; two pinks and a yellow…”
“You tend to think that she’s anti-feminist”: Jacqueline Durran
During the interview, Durran pointed out that while they were making the costumes and filming she noticed that there is an under-explored side of Barbie dolls one that Greta Gerwig is looking forward to exploring in her movie. She said, “I never thought of Barbie as having a feminist aspect–because of the body shape, you tend to think that she’s anti-feminist. Before I started working on the film, I hadn’t realized Greta’s point that Barbie was revolutionary because it was the first time that girls started playing with somebody who had agency and did things, rather than a baby.”
The costume designer mentioned that since there are so many different looks of Barbie out there, it became difficult to find the looks that are recognizably Barbie and she asked Mattle to help her out. She notes, “They told me it was a Barbie in a yellow dress. It turned out that it probably wouldn’t be recognisable if I did an iteration of it.”
Durran said during the interview, “Barbie is a very useful way to look at different ideas of femininity: what that means, who owns it, and who it’s aimed at. It is always about the ideal, so through the costumes, we give each character a look that reflects the ultimate Barbie look of 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”.
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie to examine societal pressure
The director recently acknowledged that Mary Pipher’s 1994 book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, a collection of case studies used to examine the pressures society places on young girls as they mature, served as the inspiration for her Barbie. She will use her fictitious persona to investigate the pressures that women in today’s society face.
The enormous culture shock that Robbie’s Barbie experiences as she ventures out into the real world and searches for her true calling serves as a wonderful lens through which to analyze how women’s roles in society have changed throughout Barbie‘s history. The magic of Gerwig and Robbie, as well as the exceptional cast of the film including Ryan Gosling, has generated a lot of excitement among fans.
Barbie comes out in theaters on July 21.
Source: Vogue
