NEW YORK (NYTIMES) – It is the primary week of the brand new 12 months, however the competitors to win the 2022 trend collaboration sport, that ever-escalating race to give you probably the most eye-popping, head-shaking counterintuitive pairing of manufacturers, has already begun.
First out of the gate: Balmain, the French excessive trend home, and Barbie, the final word plastic doll. It could sign the official breaching of the subsequent huge trend frontier: the world of toys. Although the wedding of Mattel iconography and materials iconography just isn’t precisely what you would possibly count on.
There isn’t any doll concerned: As an alternative there’s a 50-piece Barbie-inspired assortment for grown-ups. It’s modeled by racially numerous avatars and can embrace three non-fungible tokens of one-off seems to be to be auctioned on-line, every of which comes with a doll-size bodily design, thus extending Barbie’s attain into the digital collectible house.
And most pointedly, each the gathering and the NFT seems to be are unisex: Barbie clothes that erases the Ken-Barbie divide.
In any case, even within the period of the primary feminine vice chairman, when Barbie and all of the antiquated feminine stereotypes she will symbolize appear irrelevant, the gathering is disarmingly interesting.
It was designed with a touch of irony filtered via pink glasses and the large grin of a boy who as soon as felt he wasn’t imagined to play with dolls and has now been given free rein to reimagine the most well-liked one on the planet.
“Having Barbie in my Balmain military, making a set impressed by her the place there aren’t any boy garments or lady garments, is my small revenge,” stated Olivier Rousteing, artistic director of Balmain.
“I believe Barbie represents a joyful dream world. There’s nothing unsuitable with a dream. However let’s push the dream and never dream of the Fifties or Nineteen Sixties, however 2022. For me, it is much more than only a industrial challenge. It is very emotional.”
He was talking, he stated, from private expertise – “as a child, I did play with Barbies and did really feel some rejection for it”- which was the explanation he was involved in taking his relationship with Mattel past the dress-the-doll section.