The best dressed doll in Hollywood
She’s been a style icon for 65 years, and Barbie is still wowing fans with her fashion-forward looks, thanks to her personal stylist (yes, really!)
We’ve got a nomination for best dressed star at the Oscars, and it’s not Margot Robbie, Emma Stone or Florence Pugh. Posing up a storm on the red carpet in a black column dress with extravagant pink bow, it was the perfectly accessorised Barbie herself who took our crown.
The plastic doll, who turns 65 this month, was photographed on location at the Academy Awards, to the delight of her 2.8m followers on her Instagram account, @Barbiestyle.
“Whoever posed this beautiful Barbie is totally on point,” raved one. “Hand on hip, one foot slightly in front of the other… picture perfect.”
The person behind this Instagram look, and hundreds of others, is Barbie’s official stylist, Rachel Ritter – yes, that really is a full-time job. Ahead of
Barbie’s big moment on the red carpet, we jetted to Los Angeles to meet Rachel and go behind the scenes as she pulled together the perfect look.
After a short drive from the airport, the bright pink Barbie bus drops us off at the one-storey
Mattel building surrounded by palm trees, where Rachel is waiting to greet us.
“I want to show you my favourite part,” the 28-year-old says, as she leads us through corridors with floor-to-ceiling displays of vintage Barbies.
“All the tiny little clothes.”
Inside her styling wardrobe,
Rachel opens drawer after drawer crammed with colour-sorted vintage pieces of Barbie clothing. We run our hands through thousands of shoes, sunglasses, hats, coats and outfits.
Ahead of the crowd
One large cupboard holds nothing but Barbie heads, with every skin tone and hair colour and texture you can imagine – all carefully presented on small spikes, rather like the nightmare-inducing scene from 1985’s Return To Oz. “This is the totally not creepy head cabinet,” joked Rachel, in a recent Barbiestyle post. Like any celebrity stylist, Rachel takes inspiration from current trends and melds them with a touch of vintage. In her case, the vintage is a meticulous archive of tiny
Barbie fashion, going all the way back to the very first doll.
“We are always mixing and matching custom, vintage and specialty pieces,” she says.
“I’m pulling from all different kinds of inspiration and sources.”
When Rachel can’t find what she wants in the archive, she has it created.
“Our designers custom-make things for our social channels,” she says. “So if I feel there’s a spring trend coming up and we don’t quite have the perfect piece, we get it made.”
While Barbie’s Instagram includes a healthy dose of fantasy, one thing that isn’t made up is Barbie’s location tag – she really did go to the Oscars.
“For each set-up on Barbie’s social media, the doll travels to the location, along with a team,” explains Rachel. “When she’s shooting on location, she’s actually there.”
Like any modern influencer, Barbie keeps a close eye on the latest trends.
Rachel says, “When I’m putting together wardrobe references or a shot list, I’m looking at Instagram, Pinterest, Tiktok. I’m putting together ideas and a mood board, and working from there. It helps us build our shot list.”
Striking a pose
After the mood board is finished, Rachel decides if any new items are needed by Barbie. “If so, I’ll do the designing. I’ll mock it up and then our really talented fabrication team will make it come to life.”
Another place she finds ideas is the stylish streets of Los Angeles. “I’m out in the world and I’m like, ‘How would this look if it was absolutely tiny and put on Barbie?’”
‘Barbie and I are slowly merging and meeting in the middle’
For an earlier red carpet event this season, Rachel prepped Barbie for the Clive Davis Pre-grammy Gala, taking a floral Mod era Barbie set and making it strapless to update it. She paired it with a Barbie signature fur shawl from the archive, originally created seven years ago for an Andy Warhol collection doll.
After curating the perfect blend of vintage and designer pieces, Rachel preps Barbie for the camera. “Before I take her to set, I touch up her hair with a tiny brush,” she says. On her workspace are a selection of set tools and what she describes as “Itty bitty props”.
Like any model, Barbie has to pose – and it falls to Rachel to get her into position, using specially created dolls 3D-printed at Mattel’s Handler Design Centre down the block, and hand-painted to give the perfect expression. These offer a greater range of movement, with interchangeable body parts to suit the scene.
On Rachel’s desk sits an entire drawer of hundreds of tiny hands, all with the fingers in subtly different positions, some fused to better support props. “I pose the dolls, tweaking their positions until they look just right,” she says.
She’ll use real water, coffee and even mini real ice cubes in cups to bring the vision to life.
As a lover of Barbie growing up, Rachel likes to include throwbacks to her childhood. One example was a 2002 bucket hat, which she recycled for a recent Instagram post.
“That was a Barbie I played with, and when I saw the hat in the closet, I was like,
‘We have to use this,’” she recalls.
Spending her day immersed in Barbie has had an unavoidable influence on Rachel’s own style, which doesn’t go unnoticed by her boyfriend, Jonah.
“He says Barbie and I are slowly merging and meeting in the middle,” she laughs. “When I’m shopping for myself, I’m like, ‘Oh, if I could only have this in miniature.’ Then, if I get something made for Barbie, I’m like, ‘It’s perfect… if only I could have it!’”