South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Barbie, Balmain team up for 50-piece collection, NFTs
It’s the new year, but the competition to win the 2022 fashion collaboration game, that ever-escalating race to come up with the most eye-popping, head-shaking counterintuitive pairing of brands, has already begun.
First out of the gate: Balmain, the French high fashion house, and Barbie, the ultimate plastic doll. It may signal the official breaching of the next big fashion frontier: the world of toys. Though the marriage of Mattel iconography and material iconography is not exactly what you might expect.
There is no doll involved: Instead there is a 50-piece Barbie-inspired collection for grown-ups. It is modeled by racially diverse avatars and will include three nonfungible tokens of one-off looks to be auctioned online, each of which comes with a doll-size physical design, thus extending Barbie’s reach into the digital collectible space.
And most pointedly, both the collection and the NFT looks are unisex: Barbie clothing that erases the Ken-Barbie divide.
After all, even in the era of the first female vice president, when Barbie and all the antiquated female stereotypes she can represent seem irrelevant, the collection is disarmingly appealing. It was designed with a dash of irony filtered through pink glasses and the giant grin of a boy who once felt he wasn’t supposed to play with dolls and has now been given free rein to re-imagine the most popular one in the world.
“Having Barbie in my Balmain army, making a collection inspired by her where there are no boy clothes or girl clothes, is my small revenge,” said Olivier Rousteing, creative director of Balmain. “I think Barbie represents a joyful dream world. There’s nothing wrong with a dream. But let’s push the dream and not dream of the 1950s or 1960s, but 2022. For me, it’s a lot more than just a commercial project. It’s very emotional.”