"Barbie" has had an outsize influence on fashion

“Barbie” only arrived in theaters today, but we are all already Barbie girls in a Barbie world. For more than a year now, pink clothes have dominated the runways in Paris, and #barbiecore has infiltrated our social media feeds — and our closets. The promotion around “Barbie” has inspired multiple collaborations with every kind of brand, from the Parisian couture house Balmain to the machine-washable rug upstart Ruggable, suggesting that the Greta Gerwig-directed movie is less about whether a blockbuster can be made with artistic credibility and more about how lengthy and convincing a marketing campaign can be. How far can a movie go in enticing us to adapt more pink, more play, more Barbie?

Nowhere has “Barbie’s” outsize influence been more evident than in fashion — and it’s much bigger than #barbiecore. (As big as … the atomic bomb? Kidding!) “Barbie” encapsulates a dramatic shift in who holds the power to decide what we wear. If we once waited for designers to hand down diktats about what’s beautiful or interesting, and then adapted them as worthy channelings of some feeling in the air, we now wait for a combination of celebrity and entertainment to motivate us to open our wallets and play with clothes. In the process, it seems the fashion industry itself — like everything else in this age — is becoming one big Marvel Cinematic Universe (with better hair).

Perhaps the strangest upshot of the “Barbie” phenomenon is the penetration of #barbiecore into the highest echelons of fashion. In March 2022 — more than 16 months before “Barbie” was released — Valentino designer Pierpaolo Piccioli sent out a fall 2022 collection of 81 looks, half of them in searing hot pink. The idea, he said at the time, was that seeing everything in the same piercing shade made the details clearer and the individual emerge. Its actual effect was revealed when, the next season, he dressed a sea of celebrities and influencers in the shade for the show: They looked like an army of living, breathing Valentino Barbie dolls. Even if Piccioli wasn’t thinking of Mattel’s classic blonde when he created the clothes, he seemed to be suggesting that there was a power to all of us looking ridiculously, boldly the same — one of Barbie’s most sacred conceits.

More recently, in May, Chanel presented a plastic-fantastic Resort 2024 collection of powder-pink tweed miniskirts and hot pants with purply-pink sweatsuits — not only a bid to entice the younger clientele that creative director Virginie Viard continues to court and who will want to put a luxury spin on what they see on screen this summer, but also an implicit nod to its house ambassador since 2018, “Barbie” star Margot Robbie. Late in the film, Robbie heads off to simultaneously seduce and hoodwink Ken (women today!) in a hot-pink minidress accessorized with a heart-shaped Chanel logo bag and a necklace studded with jewels and Chanel double-C’s. Chanel confirmed that the house “proudly worked alongside ‘Barbie’ creatives to realize several costumes for Margot’s character,” and costume designer Jacqueline Durran told Vogue in an interview that “if Margot wears anything that we didn’t make, it’s pretty much Chanel.” (Robbie also wore a slate of Chanel for her July issue Vogue cover shoot.)

Why does it matter where fashion designers get their ideas? Isn’t fashion’s great power that it can draw from anywhere, from places high and low? That remains true, but to create clothes that capitalize on the buzz around an upcoming film is to insist that marketing is a worthy source of inspiration. It suggests a paucity of sources for original ideas — that it’s now valid to mine promotional campaigns when we want to make statements about what is happening in our world and who we want to be, which is what fashion does.

And, anyway, it isn’t that designers automatically sell out by playing with the “Barbie” zeitgeist. Take Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson’s entry in the “Barbie”-verse. For spring 2023, he spent months perfecting a shiny, jumbofied pump that slips onto the foot like Barbie’s classic heels. In Anderson’s world, the shoe is a token of how the synthetic and artificial have penetrated our world, making real life indistinguishable from what happens on a screen. Reality is just another place to play pretend. Another winning look: Schiaparelli creative director Daniel Roseberry’s re-creation of the 1960s “Solo in the Spotlight” Barbie for Robbie at the film’s Los Angeles premiere. Roseberry knows how to exaggerate the extravagances of the couture canon to wink at how self-referential and ridiculous contemporary culture has become — yet somehow manages to pull off farce with elegance. Sometimes, if something is beautiful enough, that makes a bit of cynicism worth swallowing.

Not long ago, this progression of influence went the other way around. Mattel once tasked fashion designers with dressing Barbie in extravagant Oscar de la Renta opera capes, Bob Mackie sequins and tasteful Donna Karan separates. But now Barbie’s outfits — more specifically, the thematically thin tendency to make something pink and cutesy — are the starting point for designers.

The film’s costumes seem unlikely to inspire anything as witty as the Schiaparelli gown in the years to come. Durran, a multiple Oscar winner who also worked with Gerwig on “Little Women,” has a fabulous slew of pastel plaid suits and ridiculous cowgirl get-ups — though they serve to remind us of how costume-like Barbie’s 1990s and 2000s clothing was and the extent to which contemporary fashion has come to follow a similar path. The most memorable garment in the film is Ken’s faux-fur coat — underscoring the strange fact that the proudly feminist “Barbie” movie is more accurately a parable about her misguided bimbo-misogynist boyfriend.

It isn’t just the top of the fashion food chain that is being upended. Our mind-set for shopping and getting dressed has shifted to a Barbie-like perspective: Beneath the endless chase to embody #cores and mindless trends is a new intuition that to wear clothes is to play dress-up. Like Robbie’s Barbie standing before her closet, in which a new ensemble and accessories mysteriously appear each day, we stare at our screens, waiting for the next clothing concept to reveal itself. Fast fashion is the magic wand that reveals tens of thousands of garments to help us dress cheaply and quickly for whatever notion pops up next. That’s why we hear as much about maximalist #barbiecore as we do about the seemingly antithetical “quiet luxury” — because clothes are just things we try on for a while, rather than reflections of shared cultural values or a desire to present ourselves in a certain way. In the meantime, finding normal clothes like a great T-shirt or a well-made pair of trousers seems increasingly impossible: Even the Gap is collabing with “Barbie.”

Fashion writers, designers and commentators have said forever that fashion is popular culture and shopping is entertainment. But we have entered unprecedented territory. It isn’t only “Barbie” that understands this new world: Dolce & Gabbana has brilliantly enmeshed itself in the Kardashian Industrial Komplex, attiring the family and their friends for Kourtney Kardashian’s wedding last year, and then inviting Kim to creative (kreative?) direct its spring 2023 show, which was staged in Milan in March. The clothes were almost all reproductions of 1990s designs by the brand — another sign that the marketing, rather than the original product, is now the great artistic triumph in most corners of fashion. Kim’s partnership, and an ongoing argument between the two sisters over who has the right to “dolce vita vibes,” is the defining arc of the latest season of Hulu’s “The Kardashians,” which debuted in late June. (Adding another layer of marketing extravaganza to the drama, they and their family hash out the Dolce drama while covered in Balenciaga logos.)

Who knows what will become of the sisters now. But it seems clear that if any celebrity is willing to act out a semi-scripted spectacle, whether a fashion show or a series of red-carpet premieres, there is probably a brand willing to provide the costumes.