Bloomingdale’s in New York City displays Barbie-themed merchandise ahead of Friday’s U.S. release of the new “Barbie” movie. Mattel has created a product marketing blitz, with more than 100 brands plastering pink everywhere. (AP Photo/Richard Drew),
ACROSS AMERICA — Perhaps you’ve noticed: Everything — well, not literally everything, but enough to warrant the hyperbole — is turning pink ahead of Friday’s opening of Warner Bros. “Barbie” movie starring Margot Robbie in the title role and Ryan Gosling as her boyfriend Ken.
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Doubt it?
Try typing “Barbie” in the Google search bar and see your screen turn pink as even pinker stars explode. The same thing happens if you enter the lead stars’ names or the name of the movie’s director, Greta Gerwig.
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More than 100 brands have plastered their products in pink as part of a zealous marketing blitz by Mattel, the Barbie parent company, and Warner Bros. to promote the live-action movie that explores the joys and perils Barbie and Ken face when they step from the pretend to the pretend real world. It’s a fantasy within a fantasy.
Until the “Barbie” movie, pink has pretty much kept its place.
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Pink has always been a go-to color for little girls’ princess dresses, and the lingerie retailer Victoria’s Secret trademarked PINK for its tween line in 2002. More seriously, pink is the trademark color of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a breast cancer foundation.
But it’s not a color everyone wears well or even cares to wear.
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Now, with Barbie-mania reaching a fever pitch and choices ranging from racks of pink clothing at everywoman retailer The Gap to chic designer clothing at Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdale’s, adult women are dressing in head-to-toe pink. They can even paint their toenails pink with OPI’s High Barbie shade.
Neiman Marcus launched its exclusive Barbie collaboration with Balmain last year and sold out of many items in the first few days. Based on the success of last year’s collaboration and the current Barbiecore cultural phenomenon, it has reissued the collection. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)
“Barbiecore,” trademarked by Mattel last year in the runup to the movie, has wended far beyond the fashion industry.
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XBox has a Barbie console series. HGTV came up with a four-part Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge to transform a southern California home. “And one passionate Barbie fan will win a once-in-a-lifetime sleepover staycation in the completed home,” the network said.
About living in a make-believe Barbie world: Barbie’s Malibu Dreamhouse, where the movie was filmed, was available for rent on Airbnb for the weekend of the movie’s opening. It’s very pink.
There’s even a “Pink Burger,” Burger King’s nod to Barbie-mania in Brazil. The pink sauce is about the color Pepto-Bismol, an unfortunate irony. The Barbie Combo comes with Ken’s Potatoes (French fries), a pink shake and a pink-frosted doughnut. The Pink Burger isn’t available in the United States.
Pink is so far beyond the new black, it’s in deep space. And Mattel owns it.
“For any brand to own a colour is a pretty powerful statement and recognition,” Mattel’s president and chief operating officer Richard Dickson told London-based Business of Fashion, an industry publication. “People aren’t calling it pink-core, they’re calling it Barbiecore. That becomes a powerful place to be.”
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Barbie Sales Flatten
The 11-inch fashion doll is modeled after the West German fashion doll Bild Lilli, based on a comic strip and sometimes given as a risqué gag gift for men. A focus group of moms told Mattel in 1958, a year before the doll’s release, that the perky bosomed doll was too much woman for girls.
Their concerns didn’t kill the doll or cause Mattel to do the equivalent of a reduction mammaplasty in its toy factories. Instead, as a pioneer in broadcasting commercials to children with its 1955 sponsorship of Walt Disney’s “Mickey Mouse Club,” Mattel deflected a potentially critical adult TV audience and bought ads promoting Barbie during prime children’s programming slots.
“Mix and match is fun to do,” one jingle cajoled. “What Barbie wears is up to you.”
Barbie, now 64, has aged fairly well, despite continuing criticism that ultra-thin dolls with large breasts and tiny waists — measurements that if extrapolated to a human would look cartoonish and garish — feed dangerous body image struggles just as girls are becoming more aware of their sexuality.
At odds with feminism and female empowerment, Barbie dolls began falling out of favor in the 2000s, with sales reaching a historic low in 2014 and only starting to recover in 2020. That was a $1.35 billion year for the brand, and its best in two decades.
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‘Bimbo’ Reinaissance
The sales rebound is occurring amid the so-called “bimbo” renaissance — the idea that feminism is nuanced and encompasses both empowerment and hyperfemininity. One example: Young women at a movie screening seemed to identify with the film “as if the movie were seeing them as much as they were seeing it,” reviewer Ty Burr wrote.
Another review by Common Sense Media said the film “promotes the idea that feminism is inclusive of all women — and that being a woman is complicated and sometimes messy,”
The release of “Barbie” is a watershed moment for Mattel to not only bring some of the shine back to its iconic doll with increased sales, but also expand the Barbie brand “outside the toy aisle,” Dickson told the London publication.
“Despite the fact there’s a big list of partners,” he said, “it’s a very carefully curated matrix across all industries, ages, stages, demographics, distribution so that everyone can ‘play Barbie.’ ”
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