More or less, everything evident is already told about Barbie four weeks after its premiere: from the omnipresence of pastel colors to the meaning of the monolith kubrickiano from the first scene. Going forward, the next round of cultural analysis will have to be more creative and draw unexpected comparisons to give new meaning to the film that has defined 2023.
For example: What do Barbie and Playboy? Apparently a lot is the translation of the title of a paper written by Daniela Beraun who looks at the architecture of the Greta Gerwig film and finds a thread with the magazine of Hugh Hefner, the brand that for 60 years has been to the usual Barbie (the culprit), what Stalin was to Hitler: the two antagonists who basically looked a lot like each other.
First data: Barbie has been living places since 1962, which was the first year that Mattel sold a Barbie house in the tradition of Victorian dollhouses. A single bed, a dresser, a wardrobe and a piece of furniture with a television and a record player were the initial trousseau of the doll and everything fit in a small room that had more to do with Virginia Woolf’s austere desires for independence than with the hyperconsumer paradise with which it has since been associated.
Around that time, Playboy it was more of a lifestyle magazine than a semi-pornographic publication and I had been writing and photographing architecture for almost a decade. Because? Because the great success of the magazine’s editors was to define a new type of aspirational character: the independent, urban and single man, well paid in some office job in lower Manhattan, self-assured, educated but pragmatic, apolitical, good drinker, sophisticated and somewhat cultured but not so much as to bore her friends… And, as a consequence of all this, an irresistible flirt. To shape his character, we had to create a place for him to live in, a house that represented what he was.
The scenario that Playboy created for that man, whom he called bachelor pad first and playpad later, it was an adaptation of the rationalist architecture of the 1920s and 1930s to postwar America and consumer culture: relatively small spaces, in the style of the apartment of Apartment by Billy Wilder; designer furniture (pieces by George Nelson, Edward Wormley, Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia and Charles Eames, among others); exhibition posters from MoMA and the Guggenheim (newly opened at the time); and a lot of technology. If Barbie’s first own room included a television and a record player as its main fancies, the prototypes of Playboy’s houses included very complex consoles that combined telephones, sound players, electric coffee makers, recorders… Any fancy thing that would make us touch each other today.