“Barbie really is interlinked with fashion, because how you play with her is by dressing her,” says costume designer Jacqueline Durran. “Clothes are her form of expression.” After winning an Oscar for her work on 2019’s Little Women, director Greta Gerwig asked Durran back for her next project: kitting out an entire Barbie world. Durran (who hails from London) noticed the process was different to that of her other projects: “You don’t treat Barbie like you treat a regular character because the motivation for what she’s wearing isn’t from within.”



Barbie is practical, really. “The defining characteristic of what she wears is where she’s going and what she’s doing,” Durran explains. “It’s about being completely dressed for your job or task.” Every doll is sold with a fashion pack, so to go to the beach, Barbie needs a coordinating dress, playsuit, bag, hat, suitable shoes, and accessories. These clothing sets change and morph depending on what is happening in Barbie Land.

Durran explains that the team had a rigorous chart of color combinations to refer to throughout the process. “We wanted the world to be a really controlled environment,” she says. It gave structure to a dizzying task. “Greta writes at 100 miles an hour, often four scenes in a page of script… There’s a lot of costume changes,” she says with a laugh, of the hundreds of looks her team created. From Barbie refuse collectors to Barbie postal workers, there were dozens of jobs to dress, leaving Durran’s team trawling through shops for the perfect pink boilersuit or Barbified toolkit. For one costume—a doctor—the team pulled up pictures of every doctor Mattel had created in the past 60 years as inspiration.