Barbie (2023) became the most commercially successful film ever to be made by a woman director. Somehow, in 2023, this particular fashion icon and 65-year-old celebrity became the heroine of a purportedly feminist film, one vociferously claimed as such by its director and its star.

If nothing else, the film surely owes its success to the now firmly established and extraordinarily effective partnership between the fashion industry and our ever-expanding celebrity culture.

This particular doll has always been of great interest to fashion designers, possibly because of the ludicrous proportions that have angered so many women for so long; it is by now common knowledge that, if Barbie attempted to stand on her tiny feet, she would topple over, while the size of her breasts would also unbalance her, and would mean that she could only move forward by crawling along the ground.

In some ways, Barbie is the single most enduring fashion icon of the last half-century. As costume and fashion designer Bob Mackie, who dressed Barbie in 1990, declared, “She could be anything we wanted her to be.”

A feminist film, or a woman’s picture?

Any examination of the film’s gender politics should begin by noting that its starting point, Barbie’s need to visit the “real world,” is motivated not by any intellectual enquiry but by her need to stop the advance of the cellulite she has detected on her improbably perfect thighs, and to solve the problem of her newly flat feet. By the end of the film, Barbie has swapped her stilettos for Birkenstocks, so at least she has the stereotypical feminist footwear.

A feminist film, of course, is not simply a film intended for a female audience, and it is presumably more than a film about women; otherwise, the “women’s pictures” produced by Hollywood studios in the 1930s and early 40s (which always placed a strong woman at the center of the narrative) would qualify.

Barbie is perhaps best understood as a twenty-first-century version of those women’s pictures rather than a feminist film. If it has a real precedent, it is perhaps Legally Blonde (2001), which showed how a young woman overly fond of lurid pink could nevertheless triumph in the male-dominated world of Harvard law, and which made no claim to feminist credentials at all.

In the film, America Ferrera in her role as Gloria delivers a long and much-quoted speech—penned for her by Gerwig—about the impossibility of being able to meet all the various demands that society in general, and men in particular, make of a woman in contemporary America. Surely this soliloquy is actually a paean of “middle-class despair”; the speaker, Gloria—who has a well-paid job, a home, and a family—is largely lamenting the fact that women are still expected to look and behave in a certain way if they are to please men and to “fit in” socially.

Even the film’s sharpest critique is delivered, and then defused, from within. Gloria’s teenage daughter Sasha confronts Barbie directly: “You represent everything wrong with our culture. Sexualized capitalism, unrealistic physical ideals . . . You set the feminist movement back fifty years. You destroy girls’ innate sense of worth and you are killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism.” Yet by the film’s end, strong-minded Sasha is transformed into a devotee, abandoning her black outfits for pastel-pink dresses, accessorized with neatly tamed hair.

Barbie-core and the cost behind the pink

Fashion is at Barbie’s very core, and Barbie-inspired trends trickled down from the red carpet to the general public, with the birth of the TikTok aesthetic “Barbie-core,” and a series of collaborations with fast-fashion companies.

Warner Bros. exploited its increasing popularity through a series of collaborations with more than a hundred brands, including several fast-fashion companies like Zara, H&M, Forever 21, Shein, and Boohoo. The many marketing projects created before, during, and after the release of this film included some products not immediately connected with a fashionable doll: a Barbie-pink Xbox, a Barbie boat cruise, even a “Barbie Burger,” with its neon-pink filling, which went on sale in the Brazilian branches of Burger King.

It was the multitude of pink-fueled Barbie-inspired fast-fashion collections that sparked criticism from, among others, sustainability activist Livia Firth, founder of Eco Age and executive producer of the documentary The True Cost, a film denouncing the human and ecological ravages of fast fashion in the Global South.

Firth wrote an enraged post on her Instagram account, pointing out the stark contrast between the empowering message supposedly conveyed by Gerwig’s post-feminist manifesto and the living and working conditions of the women producing the fast-fashion garments branded as “Barbie”:

“I can guarantee you ONE thing: they ain’t produced by any Barbie or liberated woman who gets paid a living wage or works in safe environments with no abuses. . . . How long will it last in your wardrobes before it gets thrown away / donated / recycled—aka dumped to a Global South country like Ghana or Kenya where there are no Barbies or liberated women.”

Firth’s statement points out a significant contradiction inherent within the current post-feminist cultural landscape and raises questions regarding the true significance of the movie for the feminist cause.

The red carpet as the real runway

If anything, it was the linked fashion and merchandising, rather than the onscreen content, which created the film’s extraordinary success.

Robbie continued to embody Mattel’s doll far beyond the fictional realm, wearing Barbie-inspired looks throughout the press tour. This operation was orchestrated by stylist Andrew Mukamal, who commissioned several Barbie-inspired outfits from leading fashion houses across the world, including Versace, Bottega Veneta, Chanel, Vivienne Westwood, and Miu Miu—all of which were collected in a book, Barbie: The World Tour (2024).

Robbie wore outfits directly copied from vintage pictures of Claudia Schiffer, once considered a new Brigitte Bardot, the figure sometimes credited as the inspiration for the very first Barbie doll.

Even Gerwig joined the spectacle. Elected president of the jury at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, she wore Parisian couture for all her photocalls, presumably to underline her own newfound celebrity status.

One of her designer dresses, created by John Galliano for Maison Margiela, was a rather unfortunate choice: taken out of its extraordinary and highly theatrical catwalk context, this full-skirted candy-striped dress resembled nothing so much as a 1950s housedress, as worn by middle-class self-styled “homemakers” of that period. Only the white Margiela “hoof shoes” sported by the director gave any indication of the outfit’s couture origins.

In recent years the press-tour red carpet has become the most privileged of runways, where the cult of personality and the star power of the actress is merged with the transformative visual appeal of fashion. The body of the movie star sits at the epicenter of the operation where cinema, celebrity, and fashion collide—what in social media terms is called a “viral moment.”

Perhaps, then, our response to the extraordinary way in which a highly lucrative fashion spectacle was allowed to masquerade as a feminist film should be something closer to “despair”, one that cuts across age, economic status, and ethnicity.

The text of this article has been extracted from the chapter ‘Fake Feminism and Strident Pink Spectacle: Fashion, Celebrity Culture, and the Marketing of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie’ by Pamela Church Gibson and Alexandre Zamboni, in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie: Popular Culture, Cinema, and Gender (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), and edited to appear here with the authors’ permission. Read the unedited extract.

About the contributors

Pamela Church Gibson, formerly Reader in Cultural and Historical Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, now lectures at Central Saint Martins. An internationally recognized scholar of film and fashion, a field she helped to define, she has published extensively on film, fashion, gender, costume and heritage and co-edited six books.

Alexandre Zamboni is a freelance fashion scholar and curator. He holds a BA in Fashion Design from Università Iuav di Venezia and an MA in Fashion Studies from Stockholm University, and is co-authoring a book with Pamela Church Gibson on the relations between fashion and celebrity in contemporary culture.

Their book Fashion, Consumption and Celebrity Culture: New Developments in a Transformed Landscape will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2027.