Barbie’s Feminist Revolution: An Exclusive Interview with Costume Designer Jacqueline Durran
Barbie’s Connection to Fashion
“Barbie is intrinsically linked to fashion because dressing her is part of the play experience. Clothing is her form of self-expression,” explained Jacqueline Durran, the costume designer for the “Barbie” movie, in an interview with British Vogue. Durran noted that working on creating Barbie’s entire world was different from her other projects: “You don’t approach Barbie the same way you would a regular character. Because the choice of what she wears doesn’t come from within.”
Creating Barbie’s World: The Color Palette
“I had a team of people who scoured every shop in London daily for clothes in specific colors,” Durran recalled. The defining characteristic of Barbie’s outfits is where she’s going and what she’s doing. It’s about putting together a complete look for her role or task. Each doll comes with a fashion pack. For instance, to go to the beach, Barbie needs a suitable dress, a jumpsuit, a bag, a hat, shoes, and accessories. These outfits change and transform depending on what’s happening in the doll’s world.
The beach is a key location in the film. However, Durran didn’t merely copy the doll’s beach set. Instead, inspired by Brigitte Bardot’s iconic beach beauty, she recreated looks from the 1950s and 1960s. All costumes in “Barbie Land” correspond to one of fifteen color combinations, “referencing the idea of the French Riviera beach in the early 1960s.” Think of the bright trio of perfect summer pastel tones: “lavender, bright blue, light blue; green, orange, beige; orange, blue, pink; two pinks and yellow…”
The Challenges of Costume Design
Durran explained that the team had a strict color combination chart they referred to throughout the process. “We wanted Barbie’s world to be truly doll-like, absolutely controlled, and ‘correct,'” she said. This approach set a high bar and significantly complicated the task.
“Greta (the film’s screenwriter and director) writes at 100 miles an hour, often four scenes per script page… Many costume changes,” Durran recalled about the hundreds of looks created by her team. These included garbage collectors and postal workers, requiring the team to scour shops for the perfect pink jumpsuit or a set of Barbie-fied tools. For one doctor’s costume, the team used photos of all the doctors created by Mattel over the past 60 years as inspiration.
They had eleven weeks to make everything, but the team continued creating costumes during filming. This had one advantage: they could constantly add new ideas. In one of the later fittings, actor Ryan Gosling came up with Ken-branded underwear for his character, and this detail went viral when interest in the film slightly waned. “We just rushed to make it,” said Jacqueline Durran.
Ken’s Image: “Nobody Cares About Ken”
Bright sportswear from the 80s is a key look for Ken, complemented by several stretch disco jumpsuits and hyper-masculine cowboy outfits. “He’s sporty. We had buyers in America who would find and send us clothes because he needed a lot,” recalled the costume designer.
Otherwise, as in life, Ken was more of a sidekick. “Nobody cares about Ken; everyone just wants to play with Barbie,” said Durran. “He’s like Barbie and changes too, but he has far fewer options.”
Barbie’s Feminist Revolution
“I never thought Barbie had a feminist aspect—because of her body shape, you tend to think she’s anti-feminist,” said Durran. “Before I started working on the film, I didn’t understand Greta’s point that Barbie made a real revolution! Because for the first time, girls started playing not with a baby doll but with someone who had free will and did things herself.”
When choosing costumes, Durran initially wanted to draw on the doll’s history, starting with her earliest incarnation—the 1959 Barbie. That Barbie wore a black-and-white one-piece swimsuit, red lipstick, blue eyeshadow, and heels. Her almost identical recreation debuted in the first trailer for the film, which was a parody of a space odyssey.
“I tried to reference Barbie’s history,” said Durran. “But now there are so many doll images, and it’s hard to find modern images that are recognizable as Barbie. I asked Mattel to name the most popular Barbie costume in the last five years. They told me it was a doll in a yellow dress. If I had repeated this look, the viewer wouldn’t have recognized it as Barbie’s style.”
Durran notes that “Barbie helps to look at ideas of femininity from different sides: what it means, who it belongs to, and who it is aimed at.” This is reflected in the film. “Barbie is always perfect, so through costumes, we give each character a look that fits into the overall narrative. In Barbie Land, there is more than one Barbie, so if they all gather for the same event, ‘they are not in uniform, but their looks complement each other.’ But as the main character, played by actress Margot Robbie, develops and changes, so do the others.”
“One aspect of the film is self-discovery. All Barbies, but especially Margot’s Barbie, have a journey—to go inside themselves. And we were able to pick elements of Barbie’s fashion to hint at this inner journey.”
Chanel and the Color Pink
Pink, of course, is important. But it’s not everything. “It’s a very strong part of her wardrobe, but not 100 percent,” said Durran. “But if you want to look like Barbie, I think pink would suit you.”
Most of the costumes in Barbie Land were “sourced” and created by Durran’s team, but “if Margot is wearing something we didn’t make, it’s Chanel,” of which Margot Robbie has been an ambassador since 2018.
“They were very interested in supporting us and helping us find looks that would ‘work’ in this story. They sent us everything we wanted. It was just great working with them. From the fashion house archives, they pulled out costumes, beachwear, sportswear, and accessories—mostly from the 1980s. All good, but not ‘the right size or color, they redid for us,'” she said.
