Forget Barbiecore: I want to dress like Bella Baxter

Ahead of the Oscars, three of 2023's most stylish movies — Barbie, Poor Things, and Priscilla — examine the joys and horrors of being a real-life doll.

C’mon Barbie, let’s go party. Courtesy of Warner Bros.

My nieces have a bin of Barbies, and none of them look like Margot Robbie in Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s hit film, which is nominated for several Academy Awards tonight — including best picture and best costumes.

Costumed by Jacqueline Durran, Robbie’s Barbie is blonde, lissome, and dressed to the nines, perpetually pretty in pink. My nieces’ Barbies are bedraggled. Matted hair. Missing limbs. Maniacally mismatched outfits, like a fancy brocade jacket with athletic shorts underneath, or no clothes at all. Last spring, while visiting my family for Easter, I tried dressing these poor plastic creatures with some dignity. My nieces took one look at my carefully assembled outfits, and tore them off.

Watching Barbie I kept thinking of my nieces’ deranged-looking dolls and laughing. Barbie Land is a feminine, if not exactly feminist, utopia. Yes, the women run the show, but they aren’t allowed to age, have a bad day, or look anything less than perfect. (The ones who resemble my nieces’ dolls are banished into some remote corner of the island, away from sight.) Robbie is called Stereotypical Barbie, but she’s more like Still-in-the-Box Barbie: untouched by the grubby hands of the little monsters who will mangle, disfigure, and destroy her — in other words, play with her.

Too much is never #Kenough. Courtesy of Warner Bros.

Ken (Ryan Gosling in a gloriously go-for-broke performance), however, looks like he was actually styled by a child. Inspired by a photo of Sylvester Stallone he sees in the real world, Ken ditches the coordinated separates and adapts the Rocky star’s cartoonish swagger with unhinged enthusiasm. He wears a white floor-length mink with black leather pants, bedazzled belt buckles, fingerless gloves, bandana headbands, and an oversized sparkly horse pendant around his neck. Ken — like most kids — believes that too much is never enough; that discipline and self-control is boring; and that chaos is preferable to order. It’s very much the way my 5-year-old sees fashion: Why would she wear only one beaded necklace when she can wear 10? And you know, I can’t really argue with her. She looks great.

Emma Stone as Bella Baxter in Poor Things. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

If I were a little girl, I would want to dress like Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter, the omniverous, pleasure-seeking heroine in Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’ steampunk feminist retelling of Frankenstein.

Bella, like Barbie, is a kind of doll — in this case, a reanimated corpse. She has the body of a young woman and the brain of a child, the result of an experiment by disfigured mad scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Defoe), whom Bella calls “God.” But while God devotes himself to her education and growth, and keeps her hidden from Victorian London society, he pretty much lets her do whatever she wants: bang on the piano, break all the china, toddle around torturing her nanny and wreaking havoc. When Bella decides to run off with a lascivious lout (Mark Ruffalo), God does not try to stop her. So he certainly does not try to tell her what to wear, either.

Bella’s brilliant costumes — by Holly Waddington, also nominated for an Oscar — are at once exuberant and completely haphazard. Like many little girls, Bella delights in the over-the-top: voluminous puffed sleeves, tiered ruffles, pastel hues. Yet she gets bored quickly. She wears a bustle with no skirt over it; she pairs a silk moire mutton-sleeved blouse with silk shorts and white boots; she never buttons her jackets. She does not have the patience to get fully dressed. She has too much else to do, to see, to experience. Clothes — especially big, loud, fancy clothes — are great fun, but they aren’t everything.

Priscilla’s and Elvis’ wedding only looks like a fantasy. Courtesy of Mubi.

In Sofia Coppola’s quiet-yet-nightmarish Priscilla, clothing is both a trap and a means of liberation. When we first see Priscilla Beaulieu (newcomer Cailee Spaeny) she’s a 14-year-old Army brat in a soft pink cardigan and plaid pleated skirt. Then she meets Elvis (Jacob Elordi), ten years her senior and the most famous rock star in the world.

Three years later, Priscilla’s living in Graceland, Elvis’ teenage girlfriend — or at least plaything. Elvis dictates every aspect of her life, particularly her style. He tells her to wear blue, line her eyes in black, and pile her newly jet hair higher and higher on her head. If she deigns wear a bold print, he tells he never wants to see her in it again. Priscilla slowly transforms into a living Barbie doll: letting someone else move her, speak for her, and dress her. (Priscilla’s costume designer, Stacey Battat, did a fabulous job subtly evoking, but not slavishly copying, these icons’ larger-than-life styles — she should have been nominated for an Oscar!)

Coppola based her film on Priscilla’s memoir Elvis and Me, and both the movie and the book linger on surfaces. Elvis’ late-night, glittering, aesthetics-obsessed lifestyle didn’t leave room for much else. When she moved into Graceland, Elvis’ father enrolled her in a Catholic high school up the road, because Priscilla’s parents said she had to get her degree. Yet, Priscilla writes, “while my classmates were deciding which colleges to apply to, I was deciding which gun to wear with what sequined dress.” writes. Bang!

It’s only when Priscilla begins to shed this Elvis-imposed armor, dismantle this Elvis-imposed facade, that she can become a real girl, once again.