Costume designer collaborates with Barbie to promote style diversity

Renowned fashion designer Shiona Turini has collaborated with Barbie to create clothing and fashion styles that are both fashionable and empowering to Black culture. As one of the fashion industry’s leading experts, Turini has partnered with Solange Knowles on the visual projects, “Don’t Touch My Hair” and “Cranes in the Sky.” Turini also gained recognition as a stylist for Beyonce’s music video, “Formation.”

Barbie dolls and their fashion styles have come a long way since the first Barbie made her debut in 1959. In 1967, Mattel began introducing dolls of color, called “friends of Barbie,” with the debut of “Colored Francie.” But it wasn’t until 1980 that the first Black Barbie was available. Since 1980, diversity of skin tone and facial features have continued to move beyond the white-only dolls pre-1967. And it’s this diversity that Turini wants to embrace and enhance with her Barbie fashion designs.

A longstanding fashion icon, Barbies are now available in different body shapes than the original – and unrealistic – body measurements created decades ago. Turini notes that Barbie was her very first fashion icon, as she recollects going to New York to try and find Barbies of color. Turini wants all children to be able to “see themselves” in the iconic Barbie brand, through the “lens of black culture.”