By Pratyasha Sarkar
Summary:
The cultural phenomenon of Barbiecore has transcended fashion’s upper echelons to become a ubiquitous presence in street markets across India. The colour pink, traditionally associated with saccharine sweetness, has shed its stereotypical image, inviting a mass acceptance of its vibrant variations. From Valentino’s striking pink runway to the rollerblading adventures of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, the Barbiecore aesthetic has captivated the fashion world. Celebrities like Nicki Minaj and Kim Kardashian have embraced this trend, while the colour itself carries deep historical and political connotations.
With larger portions of high-octane trends living an ephemeral life bound by the upper strata, encompassing the limited who’s who of the fashion, the Barbiecore seems to have permeated a few layers, of the status hierarchy to end up in every street market, giving us a slice of the sharp savor of ‘Pink’ in the soggy monsoon streets of India.
Upending the saccharine-esque version of the colour, a mass concurrence has landed to accept the colour stripping down to unleash newer bouts, setting in motion several shifting narratives.
When the Dalgona coffee and Banana bread were high, was the only liberator for our brains lulling inside the sequestered households, into the mire and muck of the ‘teams meeting’. Valentino’s saturated, scintillating Pink adorning the FW 22 runway, acquired from the Picciolo x Patone collaboration shortly after the latter declared a fresh magenta, ‘Orchid flower’ as the colour of the year, breathed colour into the otherwise dreaded black and white of lives that were, like a slow-motion stock video showing a paint laden brush being dipped into a bowl of fresh water!
The way in which the Barbie duo, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling rollerbladed into the summer of 22, in latex suits blazing in the esprit neon and pink, a proliferation or a fresh inculcation of a hot-piquant pink, into the wardrobes, was a nno-brainer with the people picking up on the barbiecore in no time.
Nicki Minaj, the self-proclaimed ‘Harajuku-barbie’ rightfully gave herself the title, commemorating her age-old Barbiecore liaison, initiated much before the onset of the trend, while the rest of the fashion moguls took their time to chime into the tangy-high of the Pink. The ex-lovebirds Megan and MGK were seen dripping in Pink for the premiere of Kelly’s documentary, ‘Life in Pink’, while Kim Kardashian got rid of her Black Balenciaga Lycra to be lying in a pink bed, draped in pink alls. The Barbie aesthetics, prosperously pinked red carpet after red carpets, with celebrities donning outfits from the Valentino PP collection to date. Of course, the other designers have also played their bit!
However, being a colour crammed with denotations of gender identity, pink has always bore an array of changing values, eventually being shaped into a colour piled with political history.
And the influx of the brand-new iteration of the colour has somehow left us at a crossroads, with an anticipated evolution crashing in.
The neo-styled version of the colour reminisces of Schiaparalli’s ‘shocking pink’ from the brand’s dog days of the 1930s. It was inspired by the Cartier’s neckpiece ‘Tête de Bélier (Ram’s Head), featuring a 17.47-carat diamond, owned by the notoriously reputed, transatlantic bad girl of the time, Daisy Fellowes. Referring to it as “Bright, impossible impudent, becoming, life-giving, like all the lightstand the birds and the fish in the world together, a colour of China and Peru but not of the West – a shocking colour, pure and diluted”, the designer devised a packaging in the said shade of “shocking-pink” for the band’s first perfume, justifiably named ‘Shocking’. And the colour kept tracing its way back to the brand’s collections year after year.
The jagged details of the ‘New pink’ intervened the colour’s growing identity towards a linear brand of femininity, gradually soaring during the 1950s, while peaking around three decades later during the 1980s, preceded by a period patronizing unisex colours influenced by the second wave feminists, while the 90s saw the parents idealising a constructed colour palette for their kids.
With the onset of the twentieth century, the colour was somewhat garnered as a knight in shining armour, emblematic to the amorphous strength presiding in the ‘fairer sex’. The homespun knitted pink pussy hats worn in the Women’s marches against Donald Trump’s MAGA caps were made in the factories. The Year 2006, laid the foundation for Sampat Pal Devi’s Gulabi Gang, who were thrashing injustice towards women, being clad in fiery pink sarees.
The same year, the word ‘bimbo’ meaning ‘to appear as an eye candy, with no trace of intellect’ flared up across media, with American publishers lashing out at the then labelled ‘bimbo summit’ of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. The following year was called the ‘year of the bimbo’, as according to the media the trio was hitting new lows in their lives.
The word, which originally described a baby boy in Italian, came to be used to refer to women in a song for a Broadway musical called My Little Bimbo Down on the Bamboo Isle in 1920. Needless to say, it’s not fantastic to refer to an adult woman by a phrase that was formerly reserved for kids.
As an antithesis to Hollywood’s femme fatale, the bimbo or the dumb-blonde bombshell archetype appeared innocent, childlike and less threatening. Sexualised and characterised by wholesomeness and beauty, dumb blondes’ mental faculties never toppled their appearances – think Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei singing ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s best friends’ wearing the iconic Hot pink gown in Gentleman Prefers Blonde. The archetype is almost idiosyncratic to a fashion aesthetic submerged in everything pink. The blazing hot pink, oozes the desirable amount of innocence with the ditzy, skittish stints in a whole of sexiness.
Subsequently, the archetype gave rise to the ‘Girl boss’ hustle culture in mid 2010s, carving a touchstone for ‘Brains over Beauty’
Well, having a fair share in Barbiecore’s opulence, #bimbotoks setting our FYPs flickering in the glare of the hot pink, the self-labelled Bimbos or the bombshells of the day are subverting values, by channelling power through the hyperfeminine and constricted aspects of the ‘too feminine’ coded linearity while talking about real problems.
All in all, while we are awaiting Greta Gerwig’s feminist turnover of Barbie, or reaping the benefits of ‘dopamine dressing’ by wearing the hot pink every day with a pink graphic liner, this Pink Glam up is only giving a sweet time!
