Well, my childhood dream came true, and here it is.
Photos: Mark Hunter
Makeup: Carlene K
Hair: Tyron Dupre
Barbie: Merethe Hopland
Christie: Kirby Griffin
From LA weekly:
- Wildfox's new Barbie line is the perfect thing to wear while nursing that hangover.
In the midst of a serious Barbie backlash, one L.A. fashion designer is taking Barbie's side — by attempting to bring back her pastel-colored, jazzercise-ready wardrobe of the early 1990s.
The new fashion collection, designed by the West Hollywood-based women's brandWildfox, is called "Welcome to the Dreamhouse: At Home with Barbie," and it looks exactly like what you'd imagine: star-spangled leotards, mesh sweatshirts paired with acid-wash jeans, turquoise bike shorts with leg warmers and plenty of pink sweatsuits and swimsuits for every occasion. And yes, they're made to fit life-size, adult women.
Wildfox co-founder and creative director Kimberley Gordon says Mattel proposed the collaboration in an attempt to re-vamp Barbie's image and "get people our age thinking about it and make her cool." It's one of several recent Barbie fashion collaborations, including a line of Barbie tops and sweaters from Forever 21, a line of nightgowns and sleepwear from the New York-based retailer Lord & Taylor, and Jeremy Scott's high-fashion Moschino collection, which hit the runway at Milan Fashion Week in September with lots of blonde bouffants, bubblegum-pink rompers and polka-dotted prom dresses.
"I know there's so much controversy around her being a bad role model," says Wildfox's Gordon, a blonde 31-year-old who fondly remembers designing her Barbie dolls' taped-together outfits out of toilet paper. "I don't remember being a little girl and thinking about her body. I just remember her long blonde hair or the long black hair and the cute little smile and just having tiny clothes." The new Wildfox fashion line is intended as a reminder of that nostalgia, "about that time period that was so fun, and all about dress up."
But can fun adolescent dress-up translate to modern women's wear in 2014? Sure, if you're the type of woman who has the distinct privilege of spending her days climbing the Stair Master, juicing cucumbers, sipping cocktails by the pool or lounging in a jacuzzi with her BFF. These are all scenes from the "Welcome to the Dreamhouse: At Home with Barbie" fashion shoot, which features a model that could be mistaken for Malibu Barbie and another that looks exactly like Tyra Banks in the 2000 movie Life-Size, in which Banks plays a doll, fittingly enough.
While Moschino's Barbie-inspired line featured big-shouldered party dresses and sequined ball gowns, Wildfox's line is readymade for L.A. lounging.
"Barbie's done everything. She's a doctor, she's a lawyer," says Gordon. "She's a go-getter." And yes, sometimes she even gets hungover and just needs to lounge in her sweats like the rest of us.
To illustrate Barbie's "billion different jobs," Gordon designed a Wildfox t-shirt with Barbie's resume printed on the back.
I played with Barbie until I was, like, 14 so this was incredibly fun and incredibly STRESSFUL! I felt so much pressure to cast this perfectly, design and style it, to get a more realistic dream house, like where they really might have lived in the early 90's (my favorite era of Barbie) and what they really might have owned! This was my task, real life Barbie! When I went to Mattel to meet the team I was overwhelmed with happiness!
One of the most fun things at Mattel is they say, "Everybody has a Barbie story" and it's totally true! I have about 100, I mean from my brothers obsession with my Barbie, to sexual explorations between Barbie characters, Barbie's trips to the "pool"... but now my Barbie story is this, and I am humbled and incredibly lucky to tell it!!
Please tell me and everyone in the comments,
What is your Barbie Story??
(Don't hold back.)