It’s one other lovely day for content material creation, no less than in accordance with the sky blue backdrop rigged outdoors the home windows of 1 tasteful midcentury-modern Malibu dream dwelling specifically, although strictly temporally talking, we’re in El Segundo. Indoors, seated amongst a humiliation of houseplants, a younger girl strikes a pose together with her fashionable mates. There’s a month’s price of content material to shoot this week—such is the lifetime of catering to simply over 3 million Instagram and TikTok followers—so she’s assembled a group to assist. From just a few inches away, her stylist leans ahead and adjusts the lean of a hand whereas our star influencer smiles patiently, plastically, underneath the crush of lights. Barbie is nothing if not knowledgeable.
“The smallest little motion could make it appear like a doll,” says Zlatan Kusnoor with a sigh that claims sure, I’m conscious this is a doll. Kusnoor, a senior artistic supervisor and artwork director at toy maker Mattel, oversees Barbie’s social media presence and is my unofficial tour information as we speak. Peering by his spherical, Apfelian glasses, he suggests lifting Barbie’s head just a little to zhuzh up the fake on-camera eye contact. Barbie’s photographer, producer, and social media supervisor look on. Her wardrobe stylist stands close by with a backup high and skirt and is on the prepared, if issues get actually dire, to make a run to the doll head cupboard.
To wander the Barbie manufacturing studios is to continuously recalibrate one’s sense of scale: Right here, the world shrinks down to 1 sixth of itself, from her three-room dwelling—full with a tiny pink fridge, a tiny pink espresso machine, and a glistening pool—to a complete contained universe’s price of props and equipment that make a convincing life, no less than onscreen. No element is left unattended: A miniature bell pepper will get flagged for wanting suspiciously disproportionate; one other Barbie’s surgically exact manicure earns approving coos throughout the board. “Folks suppose it’s simply taking the doll out of the field…” Kusnoor says of the enterprise that’s working Barbie’s socials whereas he waves one aforementioned blondie jerkily. “However no. It’s really very meticulous.”
Consider it as enjoying home with Barbie on the highest degree, in service of probably probably the most self-aware, if not pleasant, company presence on the web: On Instagram as @barbiestyle, our eternally teenaged Californian (and her not too long ago launched New York Metropolis counterpart, Barbie “Brooklyn” Roberts) posts slice-of-life tableaus, pink carpet appearances, and exercise selfies galore. On TikTok, the place Barbie’s movies have obtained 8.8 million likes since becoming a member of the platform in October 2021, she tries out ASMR, reveals off her beginner pottery expertise, and invitations followers to observe her arrange an (already neat) toilet.
©2023 Mattel, Inc.
In fact Barbie can be nice at posting, nevertheless it’s not simply due to her explicit entry to an infinite wardrobe and without end photo-ready make-up. Like every super-influencer price her sponcon nowadays, Barbie has savvily mastered the talent of sharing her aspirational “life” with simply sufficient character to provide any of the extra picket Kard-Jenner clones of your timeline a run for their very own scorching pink Bimmers. Half of the joke is that Barbie—effectively, the handfuls of resolution makers at Mattel—is in on it. On IG, she brags about surviving Y2K type the primary time round; in a “day within the life”–type video, she ruminates on the finer factors of being a doll (Professional: “Excellent haircut.” Con: “NEVER. GROWS.”).
What’s ironic about Barbie’s foray into the creator financial system, past a mirrored image of the state of 2023 careerism, is the apparent debt that our present era of influencerdom owes on to her. We’ve been residing in Barbie’s world for one thing like a social media era now—whether or not she was on Instagram or not. Take into account how the previous six many years or so of successive childhoods spent interchanging fashionable outfits, arranging posable limbs, and playacting fantasy CEO-astronaut-jetsetter-mermaid-cowgirl ambitions skilled us for the every day labor of #OOTD posts, #GRWM movies, and ongoing curation of our lives for public consumption. Changing into an influencer nowadays means nothing in need of treating your self—and presenting your picture—as a branded product: that’s, to seem as Barbie-like as potential.
Consider the influencer/mannequin Yaya in final 12 months’s Palme d’Or winner, Triangle of Disappointment, cheesing for a photograph with a plate of pasta she’ll by no means eat; consider TikTok’s Bella Poarch on her 2022 album Dolls, singing “Construct a Bitch” in response to her fame. The place as soon as the title “Barbie” held a derisive connotation in popular culture for vapid blonds and pretend magnificence, she’s turn out to be aspirational as soon as extra: Cue the most recent Ozempic-fueled craze for thinness, the waning stigma of cosmetic surgery, whole international provide chains rejiggered in pursuit of the fast-fashion demand (and girly-girl type à la LoveShackFancy, Hill Home, and its ilk). Sizzling lady summer time by no means ends, and I’m advised bimbofication is again. So is Barbiecore. All of it appears set to culminate later this 12 months, when Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film hits theaters July 21. We’re an enormous methods away from Little Girls.
The place Barbie’s social media will get most deliciously meta is when she displays the trimmings of influencer tradition again to us. Even Barbie is aware of that the phantasm is the purpose. On Instagram in January, she confirmed her followers how exhausting it’s to get Ken (the unique Instagram boyfriend, if you consider it) to take a superb picture of her; on TikTok, she responds to a query “How do you make your vids look so good?” with a pretend behind-the-scenes video of her “manufacturing crew.”
Like another person-as-brand (and brand-as-person) conglomeration cluttering up our social feeds, Barbie’s content material creation takes the work of a full-time group. There’s the preproduction part, the place her wardrobe stylist tracks real-life influencers and runways for inspiration: Within the type closet, journal pages forecasting neon and sheer developments are tacked up alongside a printout of Kendall Jenner carrying tights as a substitute of pants. If Barbie’s outfit can’t be cobbled collectively out of her current seems (I depend seven craft trays devoted to sneakers, sorted by coloration), classic items get known as in from eBay, or a very on-trend piece is perhaps created customized by the in-house couturier of patternmakers and fabricators.
Ideas and scripts—which the artistic group places along with a writers room—are debated and finalized. On the artwork division, I’m invited to play with a convincingly half-eaten pile of miniature hen wings being prepped for a Tremendous Bowl idea. (Observes certainly one of my guides: “No chew marks within the celery although,” to which an artwork division staffer causes, “No one needs garnish.”) I set the teeny wings down subsequent to an also-teeny brown paper supply bag that already has a micro receipt stapled on it, the higher for Ken to move the wings to Barbie’s watch social gathering. “It’s so small,” Olivier Loranger Gagnon, who oversees the TikTok shoots, explains, “however individuals do discover.”
