Barbie and Balmain want to make toys the next big fashion frontier

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It's the first week of the new year, but the competition to win the 2022 Fashion Collaboration Game, that ever-growing race to find the most striking and surprising counterintuitive brand combination, has already begun.

First out the door: Balmain, the French couture house, and Barbie, the ultimate plastic doll. It may signal the official breakout of the next great fashion frontier: the world of toys. Although the marriage of Mattel iconography and material iconography isn't quite what you'd expect.

There's no doll involved: instead, there's a 50-piece Barbie-inspired collection for adults. It is modeled after racially diverse avatars and will include three unique-looking non-expendable tokens to be auctioned off online, each coming with a doll-sized physical design, expanding Barbie's reach into the collectible digital space.

More importantly, both the NFT collection and looks are unisex: Barbie clothes that blur the Ken-Barbie divide.

After all, even in the era of the First Vice President, when Barbie and all the old-fashioned female stereotypes she can represent seem irrelevant, the collection is charmingly alluring. It was designed with a hint of irony filtered through rose-colored glasses and the giant smile of a boy who once felt he shouldn't play with dolls and has now been given free rein to re-imagine the world's most popular.

In this undated image provided by Rob Rusling, looks from the Barbie x Balmain collection. (Source: New York Times)

“Having Barbie in my Balmain army, making a collection inspired by her where there are no boy's or girl's clothes, is my little revenge,” she said. Olivier Rousteing, creative director of Balmain. “I think Barbie represents a joyous dream world. There is nothing wrong with a dream. But let's push the dream and not dream of the 50s or 60s, but of 2022. For me, it is much more than a commercial project. It's very emotional."

He was speaking, he said, from personal experience: “When I was a kid, I played with Barbies and felt a certain rejection about it,” which is why he was interested in taking his relationship with Mattel beyond the doll-dressing phase.

Rousteing previously did looks for Claudia Schiffer Barbie and, in 2021, invited computer-generated Barbie and Ken to Balmain's digital fashion show. And he's just one of a long line of designers to have made clothes for the doll, including Jean-Paul Gaultier, Michael Kors, Donatella Versace, Diane von Furstenberg, and Karl Lagerfeld.

In 2009, for her 50th anniversary, there was a special "Barbie Fashion Show" at New York Fashion Week, and in 2019 Barbie received the Fashion Designers Council Board of Directors Tribute United States, an award previously given to Michelle Obama and Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood.

But this collection takes his influence, and the concept of inclusion, to an even broader level.

As to why Mattel was interested, according to Richard Dickson, Mattel's president and COO, the company believes that toys have the potential to be a credible fashion accessory, just like handbags and perfume.

“When you combine the seriousness of couture with the fun of toys, it's very powerful,” said Dickson. As it happens, Mattel has some experience in this area, having created a limited-edition Hot Wheels Cadillac with Gucci back in October. The toy cars, 5,000 of them, priced at $120 each, sold out in minutes, according to Dickson.

In this undated image provided by Mattel, Mattel Creations x Gucci Cadillac, Hot Wheels size. (Source: New York Times)

Prices for the Barbie x Balmain collection are higher than that. They range from $295 for a T-shirt to $42,494 for an exclusive dress, which is much more than Barbie's usual prices but less than the classic Balmain, for which a basic logo T-shirt retails for $495. (No one knows how much NFTs will cost in the current digital collectibles gold rush climate; the auction runs Tuesday through January 14.) The point, Dickson said, is that just as those who can aspire to a Chanel handbag can start with a bottle of Chanel No. 5, those who dream of a Balmain dress can start with a Barbie x Balmain accessory.

“People are looking for optimism and joy, especially now that life is so heavy,” he said. "Toys are that by definition." That the same definition can be applied to fashion is one of the points of convergence.

And it's true that it's hard to look at the Barbie x Balmain collection and not laugh, despite the cloying sweetness of the color palette, which ranges from fuchsia to bubblegum (so not far), with some white , blue and yellow as accents.

There are giant, squishy inflatable bags with Balmain Paris scrawled on them in curved Barbie lettering under the 1970s Balmain logo, and clear plastic shopping bags resembling Barbie doll boxes; baby pink silk satin suits with kimono jackets and striped short pajama sets; sequined mini-disco dresses and a strapless mermaid dress. Also, dungarees and sweatshirts and tapered-shouldered bouclé jackets with gold buttons.

The pure and silly combination of kitsch with pop culture and high fashion works surprisingly well.

Add lightness to Rousteing's signature '80s power shoulders and tied-up turkey dresses, which can sometimes look overcooked, and raise the bar for collaborations. Like the Balenciaga episode “Simpsons”, it makes social and cultural commentary part of the value proposition.

And in doing so, it lends credence to Dickson's prediction that soon the hot toy industrial complex is “going to be a whole new business.”

(This article originally appeared in The New York Times.)

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