Like terra firma itself, Barbie Land was born from a volcanic eruption. “We were filming Cyrano, the Joe Wright film, in Sicily,” production designer Sarah Greenwood tells Vogue. “And we were up on Etna in two meters of snow and the volcano was literally exploding. And I got this phone call asking, would I like to do Barbie with Greta Gerwig?”
A few weeks later, Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer had signed up to bring Gerwig’s idiosyncratic vision for Barbie to life (the film is out today, for those who have somehow managed to avoid its overwhelming marketing campaign). The close collaborators, who have each been nominated for six Academy Awards for their work on Wright films like Atonement and Pride and Prejudice, set to work creating a pink, plastic world. And three years later, they have gifted us with the set of Barbie Land, a masterwork of worldbuilding that is the highlight of the entire movie. A small geopolitical crisis was well worth it.
The plot of Barbie centers on Margot Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie,” a perfect doll who suddenly begins to feel off. She is consumed with thoughts of death, and, in an even more concerning turn, her naturally en pointe feet fall flat. Kate McKinnon’s “Weird Barbie” (she was played with “too hard”—who among us has not destroyed a Barbie with scissors and Sharpies?) tells the Margot Robbie Barbie that she must seek answers out in the real world, beyond Barbie Land. It is a pity to watch her leave, because the Barbie Land that Greenwood and Spencer built is a pink paradise, equal parts Mattel, mid-century Palm Springs, and Old Hollywood with edible-looking painted backdrops, all of which combine to signal what Gerwig dubbed an “authentic artificiality.” There is minimal CGI in Barbie Land, which was built in and shot at Warner Bros. Studios in Hertfordshire, outside London.
“To my mind, we were creating a toy,” said Spencer. “A toy is tactile, A toy is real. Everybody knows what’s CGI. Your sixth sense will tell you—even children will know. So with the painted backdrops, it just gave everybody the belief that you are in the toy box, you are in there, you are a toy.”
While working with Gerwig, Greenwood and Spencer established several rules for Barbie Land, where the Barbies live in their Dreamhouses (minus Skipper and discontinued pregnant doll Midge, who is relegated to a treehouse). There was no black, white, or chrome allowed. There is no fire or water in Barbie Land—Barbie showers under a faucet with nothing coming out of it and goes to a beach where solid waves crash onto blush-colored sand. Her wardrobe has plastic wrap over it, just like a toy box. Children touch toys, and thus, everything should look tactile. Barbie’s food comes as both 3D models and flat decals; drawings of milk cartons stuck to the fridge. Proportions for the set echoed an actual Barbie Dreamhouse, where Barbie is a little too big for her furniture and car. Greenwood said that they reduced everything by 23%, “the magic number we came up with,” which lead to Robbie and her Just Ken (Ryan Gosling) looking bigger in their spaces, like a doll shoved through the roof of a little house.
Aesthetically, Barbie Land is a take on mid-century California design, like all those sharp desert houses dipped in Manic Panic. The dreamhouse itself is a reinterpretation of Richard Neutra’s 1946 Kaufmann House, the property that defined Palm Springs modernist design, but with a crucial difference: the Dreamhouse has no walls or doors. Gerwig has been quoted explaining that children don’t walk their dolls down the stairs—they pick them up and move them, hence no doors. But the lack of exterior walls also directly affects the plot; the Barbies see, and the Barbies are seen. They all wave at each other a lot, directly from their bedrooms. “There’s a naiveté and almost a kind of creationist moment in Barbie Land,” said Spencer. “It’s the whole Adam and Eve thing, that there’s no shame. There’s a real innocence to the way their life is.”
Greenwood and Spencer considered that lack of shame, privacy, and genitalia (the movie’s Barbies and Kens are indeed as smooth as dolls) when looking to Slim Aarons photos for inspiration. Aarons’ post-war work, featuring mannered socialites with Aqua Net helmet hair lounging by crystalline pools, was crucial to Barbie’s aesthetic, with the framing and colors being referenced throughout Barbie Land. “His compositions in the photographs are not sexual, there’s no sort of sexual aura about them,” said Spencer. “It s women with women, and there s no sense of threat. And that was quite a breakthrough for us. Women being comfortable with each other, just being innocent.”
In the Aarons mode, David Hockney provided a clear jumping (diving?) off point for Barbie Land’s waterless water features (Barbie’s backyard pool references the pool at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, with a mural Hockney painted at the bottom). The water was Greenwood’s favorite part of the set to work on, with Dua Lipa’s Mermaid Barbie popping up from cartoonish, pre-Hayes Code-esque rolling, solid waves. “Being from England where the weather’s always crap and gray and everything, we don’t get these beautiful blue swimming pools like you get in L.A.,” she said. So, she made one. Barbie’s pool was first painted, and then covered with layers of thick clear resin, creating a surface that was “slightly undulating,” like actual water. The actors knew the pool wasn’t real, yet they still walked around the edge of it, as though afraid to fall in.
“To me, it was always about Margot walking across the pool when she came down the slide,” said Greenwood. “It’s kind of godlike, isn t it? She walks on water. I just absolutely loved that.”
Then, there’s all that pink. Barbie made headlines when it was reported that the set required a global company’s entire supply of fluorescent pink paint, after Greenwood quipped to Architectural Digest that “the world ran out of pink.” Rosco’s vice president of global marketing sniffed that it wasn’t just Barbie—the deep freeze in Texas in 2021 damaged materials needed to make the paint, and thus the company was running on a lower supply. But it’s a great headline: the world’s whole supply of pink going straight to Barbie Land.
Throughout the 1970s, psychologist Alexander Schauss claimed that exposure to certain colors could affect human health and behavior. In 1979, he hit pay dirt with a claim that when prisoners were exposed to a certain shade of pink—named Baker-Miller Pink, for the directors of the Naval correctional facility where Schauss conducted his blockbuster study—they were less likely to behave erratically or violently. Baker-Miller Pink became a sensation: it covered the walls of drunk tanks, bus stations, and football locker rooms for visiting teams. In 2017 Kendall Jenner randomly claimed that the color is an appetite suppressant (her source is unknown).
Barbie’s signature hot pink isn’t quite Baker-Miller, though that shade is referred to in multiple headlines as “Barbie pink.” Yet while Schauss’s studies have been widely discredited in the years since he made a bunch of inmates stare at pink walls, Greenwood sees where he was coming from. “We built this set in the north of London in the middle of winter,” she said. “And then with [cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto’s] lighting, he put a thousand sky pans on this particular set. These are amazingly, brilliantly bright lights. And then he had these huge soft suns, so the quality of light on that set was phenomenal. And everybody went in there and it was bathing in color and light. It was joy, and everybody absolutely loved it. To come in from the snow outside and the rain and the wind, you come into this beautiful color and it was just like, whoa.”
Barbie, as a movie, makes numerous allusions to mythmaking and religion: Barbie is Jesus walking on water, Barbie Land is the Garden of Eden, Barbie is the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, complete with 10-foot legs. And within the world of Barbie the movie, Gerwig, Greenwood, and Spencer are the great Creators. “As much as everybody said, oh my God, you’ve created Barbie Land exactly as it was, that’s not quite true,” said Greenwood. “In a way, Barbie Land never existed because it was never a complete world. It’s an imagining of an imagining.”
