I'm not typically one to keep up with the latest movie releases or want to see them right away - my mentality is more along the lines of "it will eventually end up on a streaming platform, I'll watch it then". But that was not the case with the Barbie movie. Maybe it was my inner child screaming to go see it, or my adult curiosity to observe the creative genius that went into making the Barbie world, either way I'm so glad I did.

 

Growing up I was very lucky to have a huge 3 story Barbie dream house (it was by Little Tikes not Mattel, but I think it was still intended for Barbie) that had all the furniture a Barbie dream house would need. I even had all the home decor, fake mini food, holiday decor, etc. Like a lot of children, Barbie was always a form of artistic expression for me. But rather than creating different worlds or playing out fake scenarios, I would stage my doll's house as if it was a still life photograph. I would even change the scenes periodically and coordinate them with the holidays. Which I find so interesting because that is my art/job now. It's almost as if little Nicole knew what she wanted to do when she grew up, it just took adult Nicole a little longer to figure it out.

 

A Doll's Wardrobe was originally created by Martin Margiela for his Fall 1994 collection, and arguably one of his best. He took a doll's wardrobe produced from the 1960s and 70s, reproduced it and scaled it to human size. And while doing this he kept the proportions the same, making the buttons and hardware extremely large, like it would be on a doll's clothing. So for this edit and because I don't make clothing I just source them, I decided to do the reverse and scale down the clothing to fit a doll. Instead of me going into Barbieland, I brought Barbie to the sélect. world/studio and styled her in some more fashion forward and dark outfits compared to her wardrobe in the movie. A brief moment where my inner child and adult worlds collide.