What Barbie’s high-pink, utopian aesthetic can teach us about ourselves

Barbie… this pretty plastic doll has been maligned in recent decades, pegged as the cause of eating disorders, body dysmorphia and plastic surgery obsessions, not to mention the poster child for American overconsumption. But it’s easy to forget Barbie’s origin: she was the first doll for girls that modelled a new form of womanhood. Barbie is a bachelorette and lives by herself in a glamorous home she pays for with a career of her choosing. She has equally affluent girlfriends; she has a man but doesn’t need one. Ken, her himbo boyfriend, is more of a metrosexual accessory than an old-school patriarchal provider.

Whitney Mallett, the world’s premier Barbie historian, recently released a book exploring the evolution of Barbie’s Dreamhouse with PIN–UP, a publisher specialising in “architectural entertainment”. Tracing the history of Barbie’s living spaces, from the late 60s to the present, Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey casts Barbie in a new light – and ties in neatly with Greta Gerwig’s cinematic take, out this week. I spoke with Mallett to get some insight into her latest publication, and what she feels Barbie saccharine aesthetics can teach us today.

Playing with Barbie, like many other pastimes associated with young girls, is often considered frivolous, airheaded… how does it feel applying a more serious architectural lens to the famous Dreamhouse?

Whitney Mallett: To be serious about the frivolous is textbook camp. So definitely our project’s gall and brilliance depends on the context of how Barbie’s world had been underestimated and not previously considered worthy of serious design criticism, and it’s reinforced in how Ben Ganz designed the book playing with the ‘serious’ signifiers of an architectural monograph.

It felt fun to dig into the material for the Barbie Dreamhouse book. There was a freeness to not having any real Barbietecture antecedents, most of the writing had been more gender-y. There are definitely antecedents in the architecture history space, in terms of applying a rigorous theoretical lens to pop cultural phenomenon, the queen of that is Beatriz Colomina, whose many many books and exhibitions include a study of Playboy architecture, and who we were really lucky to have contribute to the book. She put the Barbie Dreamhouse (which is importantly a dream house for a single lady) in an interesting lineage, part of a retelling of housing for bachelors and bachelorettes as an important part of the history of Modernism, which gets overshadowed by the story of Modernist housing for the nuclear family.

I think there is real excitement and true moments of epiphany when you start unpacking such a pervasive cultural text like Barbie’s world. It’s like we know all things about it intuitively but we haven’t sat down and thought much about it. I feel like I came away from it with more knowledge of self, which might sound funny. But here’s this product with a somewhat programmatic function (dollhouses model domestic life for children) and its evolution has absorbed so many aspects of 20th-century architecture history and broader cultural history. So to understand better the material history of a toy that influenced me, I feel like I’m learning about myself. Also, my co-editor Felix Burrichter played with Barbies too. So I think it’s important our perspective is also from this place of expanding the narrative of Barbies and remembering there’s a long history of their codified usage being queered.

Evelyn Pustka’s photography of the Dreamhouse for your book with PIN-UP, Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey, is incredible; what was her process like?

Whitney Mallett: I’m so in awe of Evelyn’s photos. First of all, she had relatively limited time with the Dreamhouses. She shot them on-site at Mattel’s headquarters, and she had to go in and figure everything out in only a couple days. The way she lit the houses, their enigmatic glow, it really captures the magic of how these small plastic (and cardboard in the early days) toys make entire worlds. It was important to not have any Barbie dolls in the shots. And without any dolls, especially these close-ups of furnished rooms, I feel like there’s this slipperiness where you can forget their scale and project yourself right into the rooms. It’s a reminder that the doll is ultimately just a proxy for what we want when we play, we want to be in the full fantasy. And I also love how she shot the individual pieces of furniture with this soft austerity. There’s an uncanny effect where some of their toyetic qualities are amplified, but again there’s not a lot of context for scale, so you imagine yourself sitting in a chair or lying down on a bed. 

Are there any artists you like that are exploring Barbie, and dolls in general, in a way you find interesting? I immediately think of Portia Munson’s hyper-feminine exploration of mass production, “The Pink Bedroom”, installed in the Museum of Sex, scented by Marissa Zappas to evoke the smell of plastic dolls… 

Whitney Mallett: I have a roller of Marissa’s “The Pink Bedroom” literally right here on my desk. I love how nasty it is, that sharp artificial smell. It reminds me of this Baby All-Gone doll I had and the addictive synthetic scent of her jar of cherries. Rubber, plastic, industrial miracle materials developed for WWII, these are what Barbies are born from. When we write her off as just girly in this way, I think we totally dismiss how cyborgian she is. She is literally shaped like a war-time fighter jet. And she has no toilet and no kitchen in the early Dreamhouses. Architect Mark Wigley said something so smart that I loved, but didn’t quite fit into the book, so I’ll just quote it directly here: “In the early Dreamhouses, there seems to be a sort of distancing from the biological; like Barbie herself, the house has no liquids. It’s architecture for a body that doesn’t sweat or smell. The ultimate dream of radical singlehood is you’re not just without other people, you’re also without your insides.”

“Industrial miracle materials developed for WWII, these are what Barbies are born from. When we write her off as just girly in this way, I think we totally dismiss how cyborgian she is. She is literally shaped like a war-time fighter jet” – Whitney Mallett

Spending so much time last year studying the Barbie Dreamhouses and their American Dream of the aspirational home, I found myself thinking a lot about the work of this artist Julie Becker. She passed away in 2016 when she was only 40-something, but before that she made a lot of work that’s dollhouse-y, or like an architectural model, but in a way that captures the underbelly of that American Dream, the nightmare that’s too many people’s reality: living precariously. She made these sprawling installations with domestic vignettes of hoarders’ quarters, so much heart-breakingly miniature stuff that signaled someone sleeping in their office or staying in single-room occupancy hotels and motels, what’s considered the last stop to houselessness. Becker’s wider body of work is also shot through with fantasy too – there are sparkles and video art remixing minor canon Disney movies, all with a psychological naive eeriness that reminds me a little of Mike Kelley – which makes it even more an interesting correlative to the Dreamhouse. 

When I was filming with one of the Dreamhouses, I accidentally recreated this photograph by Laurie Simmons (Lena Dunham’s mom) which features a dollhouse with a woman’s set of legs (Walking House, 1989). When it comes to Barbie art, Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988) is canon. I love Maggie Lee’s I Want To Believe series (2016), which turned aquariums and hamster cages into teen bedrooms for Jenny dolls. And the most iconic social practice art I’ve ever experienced is the Dreamhouse, this community-run queer nightlife project which had a permanent space 2016 to 2019 and lives on in different forms, they’re on Instagram as @dreamhouse4dolls — “for gays, dolls, and dreams.” One of the founders, Gage Spex, came up with the name for an early MySpace, deciding they weren’t Barbie or Ken but the Dreamhouse.

Did you ever play with Barbies as a child yourself? How have your thoughts on the Dreamhouse evolved since you were young? Did you ever go through a period of being repulsed by what Barbie represents?

Whitney Mallett: I played with Barbies all the time, and they were totally formative for developing how I tell stories. Also Aqua was the first record I bought because of the “Barbie Girl” single. I never had a Dreamhouse (though at my Grandma’s I did have the Dreamcamper RV), but like everyone did in their own way, I made DIY architecture for my Barbies. My best was turning this white Ikea shelving unit into a make-shift condo tower, and when I think about it, my ad-hoc homestead was more like the 2021-era Dreamhouse than the neo-Victorian Dreamhouse Mattel was making at the time, so let’s say I was an early adopter of Barbie’s return to boxy Modernism.

I definitely had some growing pains with bimbo femininity and high pink girliness which Barbie feels synonymous with. My mom is a Barbie and growing up there were intense mother-daughter feuds related to her wanting my hair to be blonde and straight like hers. In my twenties I was trying to figure it out, how much I was going to invest in being reactionary to that, and how I felt about the arc from riot grrrl to selfie feminism. That’s actually why I first reached out to you, like a decade ago! I really related to some of your writing online, processing this repulsion and understanding it as socially-conditioned misogyny. You’d pinpointed back then a cohort of artists of our generation who were intentionally playing with girliness and the negative reactions they knew it would trigger. Now ten years later, it’s like we’ve collectively reclaimed Barbiecore. It’s a lean-in poptimism, Elle Woods for president moment. And we are all the Young-Girl, consumer society’s model citizen. With all these Barbie movie-related Burger King pink hamburger-type collabs this is a great time to read or re-read Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (translated into English for Semiotext(e) by Ariana Reines, also one of our greatest living poets).

Do you have a favorite Dreamhouse?

Whitney Mallett: I’m partial to the 1979 Dreamhouse, the A-Frame, which has these big skylights, a developed attic with exposed beams, really funky furniture, and a color palette you wouldn’t expect from Barbie: red and yellow. But now I’ve also got obsessed with the Dreamhouse they made for the Ice Spice and Nicki Minaj music video (above). Like at the very beginning, they have a Barbie-scale playhouse, before we enter the fantasy world and the environment turns CGI: this house is in many ways a hybrid of the 1979 Dreamhouse and the 2023 Dreamhouses (both the newest toy and the Margot Robbie movie house). Like it has the best furniture from the 1979 house, including a sofa that’s very Togo, and the best furniture from the latest editions of the 2020s Dreamhouses, like a hanging chair. It has the MCM-but-make-it-pink detailing from the movie’s Dreamhouse, the stone chimney and breeze block wall. Then its roofline, these two intersecting slightly-pitched roofs, feels again like it’s borrowing elements from all these different Dreamhouses but making something that’s ultimately its own and in my opinion the chicest of all. And funky-cute, it has these clear colored plastic room partitions I love that remind me of the Eames House (1949), but also in a way like Y2K inflatable furniture. In my head, it’s the house for the pink sauce girl to retire to in Palm Springs after she sells enough pink sauce on TikTok.

Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey is out now

Join Dazed Club and be part of our world! You get exclusive access to events, parties, festivals and our editors, as well as a free subscription to Dazed for a year. Join for £5/month today.