Barbie loves De Bijenkorf

It started out with a petit plastic doll that included long blond hair, big blue eyes, an imperturbable smile, impossible body sizes and a pink dress that hurts your eyes. Although little brothers seemed to like nothing more than to cripple and troture our most precious property and an old barbie was quickly forgotten with the coming of a more fancy modern pregnant barbie with a loose belly (incl. baby barbies offcourse) our love for the plastic icon is eternal.

 

Last year Barbie turned fifty and to celebrate her still charming and youthful appearance several designers showed their view on how a true barbie dress should look like. This year five dutch designers (Bas Kosters, Claes Iversen, Miss Blackbirdy, Spijkers en Spijkers and Addy van den Krommenacker) repeated this ode to Barbie, designing their own Barbie dress. At the Barbie loves de Bijenkorf event those dresses were shown as well as five New York designs (Nicole Miller, Koi Suwannagate, Betsey Johnson, David Dixon and Parvesh & Jai) from last year.

 

Bas Kosters is with his personal collection of 151 barbies probably the biggest Barbie expert of the bunch. He created a short dress with a handmade patern and big shoulderspads made of colourful and decorative facings.

The dramatic long turquoise gown that Addy van den Krommenacker designed for Barbie is not that different from the dresses he usually shows. As he confirms himself Barbie fits perfectly in his feminine and elegant clothing.

A suprising colour input came from Miss Blackbirdy. Instead of screaming bright colours, she choose for a subtle nude. The drawings she made for the dress were layered upon the nude, ‘I drawed my dream dress, a dress that every girl would want to wear. Long, elegant with bows and everything’.

The jumpsuit that Spijkers & Spijkers created, showed a side of Barbie we didn’t quite knew yet. With this androgyne look Barbie is definitely not old fashioned and ready to hit the town 2010 style.

The pink and Short (with a capital S) dress that Claes Iversen designed for Barbie was with it’s 15.000 crystals definitely not an easy job to make but resulted in a delicious doll-like dress. Iversen says he was aiming for a dress that feels like it is made for a doll, ‘I wanted to enlarge the small Barbie, but still keep it very doll-like’. Iversen also adds that the dress actually is quite in line with his last collection, ‘That collection was made for a girly girl, I think this dress is very similar to that clothing’.

For the true Barbie lovers SuperTrash designed Barbie nightgowns wich are now for sale at de Bijenkorf.

Photos by Vincent Kos

Written by Karin Aalberts