See Margot Robbie If She Actually Had Barbie’s Ridiculous Body
When Margot Robbie was first cast as Barbie, many fans agreed she was the best possible choice because she already looked like the iconic doll. And that was enough to get us thinking: what would it be like if she looked exactly like a Barbie doll? This artwork from Giant Freakin Robot provides the answer, and we’re going to be honest: this looks so creepy we thought it could have been stills from a David Lynch movie.
We used AI to generate images of what Margot Robbie would look like with the body of an actual Barbie doll, and the results are disturbing.
The first image of Margot Robbie has a realistic head that resembles the Hollywood star, but the rest of the image is hard to look at because the actor now has the downright skeletal proportions of a Barbie doll. The second image is even worse, though, because it combines features like the too-thin waist will the familiar plastic features of an actual toy doll.
We’ll just put it this way: if you were watching a movie and a guy had a life-sized woman’s doll that looked like this, it would be your first clue that they were playing a serial killer.
This looks so creepy we thought it could have been stills from a David Lynch movie.
One thing these Margot Robbie images helps to underscore is the fact that Barbie dolls have always had unrealistic proportions for women. From the earliest years of the toy to the decades that followed, there was always discourse about the fact that giving impressionable young girls toys of a beautiful, impossibly-thin woman leads to unrealistic expectations about their own bodies.
According to some, that was always the paradox of the doll: toymaker Mattel has always insisted that Barbie is a feminist product (something certainly reflected in the recent Margot Robbie-led Barbie movie), but a toy that encourages women to maintain unrealistic body shapes in order to appeal to men is actually very patriarchal.
Fortunately, a few years before Margot Robbie was cast as Barbie, Mattel decided to shake things up with the traditional design formula, but they did so more due to capitalism than feminism. According to Time Magazine, after Barbie’s sales tanked 20 percent between 2012 and 2014 and continued to tumble into 2015, Mattel decided to experiment with new designs for these dolls.
The new designs were meant to appeal to consumers of different body types and also served as an implicit acknowledgment of the fact that notions about the ideal body for women have changed greatly since the doll came out in 1959.
The Future Of Barbie
Even though Margot Robbie may not look like a classical Barbie doll in the movie, we wouldn’t be surprised if the sheer success of the film leads to another round of new designs for the iconic doll. The message of Barbie as a brand has always been that via Barbie, little girls can envision a future in which they can become an astronaut, a president, or anything in between.
By making Barbie dolls better reflect the different body types of the different consumers buying the product, Mattel can continue to serve as an inspiration to young girls long after the Barbie movie has left theaters.
