I’ve documented my love of the Mattel doll many times on this blog right here, so it should come as no surprise that this bag (Sophie Hulme, on sale for $626) caught me by surprise and took me back to the golden days of youth, when my little sisters and I would spend hours playing “Barbs” on Saturday mornings. We’d rise with the sun and trek down to “the Barbie room,” a room in our basement that had once been a second study for my father and would later become a fitness room, but was — at that point in time — co-opted by my father’s four assertive daughters. The room was an absolute disaster area most of the time, bundles of miscellaneous toys, bins, pieces of fabric, and kitchenware that we’d convert into makeshift Barbie villages to accommodate plot-lines we’d lifted from our favorite stories of the day. (We tended toward “Little House on the Prairie” and re-enactments of a very underappreciated Christmas movie called “All I Want for Christmas” featuring a very young Ethan Embry and Thora Birch, but I also recall at one point trying to recreate the plot of a portion of “The Bodyguard” I’d watched without my parents’ permission.) At any rate, check out this stunning Barbie-appropriate tote.
The key is mixing it in with otherwise staid and grown-up separates, to tone things down. I like these printed canvas flats (Alexander McQueen, on sale for $175), for example. Just a fleck of hot pink gets you so far.
OR consider a hot pink DVF blouse ($265 — or get the look for less with this $75 style), some adorable snakeskin-and-pink K. Jacques (on sale for $196), or a fab box clutch (OMG…Charlotte Olympia, $1,095):
Or, for the beach, why not a hot pink Marysia two-piece ($260) with Prada shades ($245), a black-and-white striped towel (Nine Space, $76), black-and-tan sandals (K. Jacques lookalikes!!! — J. Crew, on sale for $70):
And don’t even get me started on this wild little romp of a dress ($50), which would be perfection with some black strappy heeled sandals ($120) and a very straight-forward, minimalist black purse (Phillip Lim, $850):
Who else is a Barbie girl?