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Sentiments Couture, one of Hungary’s best-known luxury fashion houses, has been asked by Mattel (owner of the Barbie brand) to design a collection for the world’s best-selling Barbie doll, launched 65 years ago. The collection of 10 outfits, made entirely by hand, was unveiled yesterday at a brunch at the Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace in Budapest, reports Index.
It was 65 years ago that Ruth Handler created Barbie, the doll she named after her daughter. The creation was a revolutionary step forward in the toy market. Before 1959, little girls only had baby or child dolls, hence the toy, which was a young adult woman, was a huge success. Although the first Barbie, in her distinctive black and white striped swimsuit, initially looked provocative, by the early 1960s, Barbie dolls were more in the modern, well-tailored clothes that fit in perfectly with accepted American women’s fashion, the kind worn by the upper-class housewives of the time. Herein lay the opportunity for little girls to playfully adopt the roles of these housewives.
The first Barbie doll was introduced with both blonde and brunette hair. Photo via Wikipedia
To mark the 65th anniversary, many countries are preparing special marketing events, and Hungary has opened the series with a fashion collaboration in Budapest.
Sentiments Couture, which has been in business for almost three decades, was originally founded by design duo Beatrix Joó and Andor Kovács. However, since the death of her colleague in 2009, Beatrix Joó, a well-known figure in Budapest’s social scene, has been running the brand, which is extremely popular among the Hungarian elite, on her own.
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This type of collaboration is not new for Barbie, having collaborated with more than 70 brands since 1990. The first time Barbie was dressed by a famous designer, was by Bob Mackie, who designed a gold sequinned evening gown with white feather boas. Fashion houses such as Escada, Givenchy, Ralph Lauren, Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, Balmain, Karl Lagerfeld, Vera Wang, Burberry, Armani, Kate Spade, Versace, Carolina Herrera, Zac Posen, Coach, Christian Louboutin, and Zuhair Murad have also accepted the invitation, to name just a few of the fashion house names known in Hungary.
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The designers usually did not scale down their real-life models, but tried to reproduce the brands’ distinctive style by adapting them to Barbie’s 29 cm tall forms. However, sometimes designers adapt emblematic elements of real fashion history to the dolls. Dior, for example, adapted the “Bar suit,” which revolutionized the way women dressed after the Second World War.
The Hungarian collaboration follows the same idea, with most of the ten garments being real-life pieces, as they were presented as part of the Spring-Summer 2024 collection, called “Synesthesia,” at the closing day of BCEFW in Budapest in early September.
Reminiscent of seventies glamor and chic summer fashion, the collection also includes pastel tweed floral print pieces, as crochet and tweed are also represented in the Barbie sets.
Via Index; Featured image via Instagram/sentiments.official