With her beach blond hair, tan and chic shades, Malibu Barbie has been a style icon for many a young girl. Now, more than 40 years after she first hit the pop culture wave in 1971, Malibu Barbie is getting a makeover from Los Angeles designer Trina Turk.
The Malibu Barbie by Trina Turk doll ($50) and collection became available this month at TrinaTurk.com and BarbieCollector.com. The Malibu icon is the perfect canvas for Turk’s cheerful 1960s- and ’70s-inspired SoCal aesthetic.
Turk dressed the doll in a printed bandeau bikini and hexagon white lace cover-up and accessorized her head-to-toe with a beach tote, pink shades, short-shorts, a peasant blouse, floppy sun hat and white wedge sandals. The doll even got a chunky cocktail ring, pink cuff bracelet and a bottle of sunscreen.
To add to the fun, Turk’s June 2013 fashion collection, titled “Malibu Summer,” features the same items for women, so life-size Barbies can dress like their miniature muses.
The idea of working with Barbie came out of a visit last year to the L.A. County Museum of Art’s exhibition “California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way.”
“We decided on Malibu Barbie, who was born in the early 1970s and hadn’t had a refresh,” Turk said. “Her look was pretty conservative. She wore a high-neck swimsuit in a pale aqua color — even though I always think of the 1970s as bikini time. But the archivists at Mattel told us Malibu Barbie came out during a recession and that her designers didn’t want her to look too ostentatious. So we decided to update her.”
Malibu Barbie’s original platinum-blond hair now has streaky, John Frieda-style highlights, and her ultra-long blunt cut is more layered. She’s not as tan as she was in 1971 and comes with a bottle of sunblock “because now we know more about skin cancer,” Turk said. And in keeping with our shoe-crazed culture, she has a pair of totally impractical beach sandals - white patent criss-cross slides with scooped-out wood platform heels, inspired by a vintage 1970s pair from Turk’s own collection.
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