When Barbie production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer started dreaming up Margot Robbie’s Malibu domicile, they entered it as world newborns as the Barbie character. The girls had never touched one of the dolls or played in Barbie’s Dream House.
The first one was Greta Gerwig’s script, and second one was being in love with Vintage Americana – simple, fun, joyful in application to a bubblegum pink toy wonderland. These based their paradise on the great dream houses like the one and only, Kaufmann House in Palm Springs and placed this paradise within the dot in Barbie’s ‘I’.
Barbie’s biggest triumph is a world that was built around it by the team behind the spectacle. On the symbolic level, there is the nostalgia of kitschy, flashy outfits, the sweet-colored Barbie and her friends’ world which are visually sweetening movie. According to Vitelli, everything in Barbie Land needed to appear toy like, so Greenwood and Spencer judiciously reduced all by twenty three percent: making the human actors look that much bigger.
Also there were no barriers at Barbie Land’s houses; there were no walls, people could see one place to another. The best of it, as Spencer turned to The Daily Beast’s Obsessed and said “Barbies have no self-awareness.” They have no embarrassment. They have nothing like that.” Heading into the ’90s, Greenwood even compared their chastity to the biblical characters of Adam and Eve.
Fed up with always being replaced by Barbie’s Femmidents, the Kens (this time voiced by Ryan Gosling wearing a ridiculous mink coat) no longer content in just ‘beaching’ have ‘grown’ ballsy enough to put up with all the disgusting items that Barbie Land has become. Big screens, gym wear, black or dark clothing, obscene language – you got the picture.
Spencer talks to The Daily Beast’s Obsessed about the process: And as they described their design to us, they fondly remembered gazing at the butterfly before tearing it to shreds.
A crossover between darkness, woods, horses, and leather are the accouterments of Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House. There’s a saloon door to the front there is a huge unnatural enormous gaming ergonomic desk chair in the living room and far too many cowboy hats on the wall. Oh, and of course there’s a humongous punching bag at the back of the yard. This place would familiar to Andrew Tate.
But where did the idea for all this hideousness come from or as the American tourists would say; where is all this ugly coming from? It seems, however, that Greenwood and Spencer had a particular touchstone in mind for this project: the pop artist Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing.
Just as in the Mojo Dojo Casa House, the collage is a kind of chaotic juxtaposition of the images surrounding the figure of a nude muscle man whose genitals are obscured by a large orange lollipop. It is one of the most beautiful horrible things I ever seen and heard.
Speaking about this kind of collage, Greenwood commented rather appreciatively that ‘everything is just stuck on. Nothing’s blended. It’s just stuck onto this environment . And that, of course, was the main thing about Ken – everything was brought in and stuck on”.
Despite, Barbified Land is still in existence up to today, Ken never dismantled anything about Barbie Land. However, instead of commenting, he simply overlaid all his items on hers to erasing her persona beneath his. One thing Gerwig knew she did not want? Television sets—television sets all the way down to the horizon of the eye could vision. Altogether, Greenwood said that 21 televisions were deployed on the set.
Spencer said that probably anyone could draw a direct line from this horrible aesthetic to any number of people in their lives “your worst boyfriend, or your younger brother, or whoever it is.” Finally, however, “you pull all these things together, and then you find there’s a sort of aesthetics in pother.
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