this new Zara x Barbie campaign is causing a stir

The Instagram account Awkward Zara, which mocks Zara campaigns, points to the brand’s new collection in collaboration with Barbie: ultra-skinny bodies and unattainable canons of beauty …

A “unrealistic image of the body”, this is what promotes a campaign for the new collection of Zara in collaboration with Barbie. Internet users have pinned the ready-to-wear brand after the publication of photographs of this second collab ‘. The promotion of inaccessible and even unreal Barbie doll bodies did not seem to pose a problem for both brands: ultra-skinny bodies, photographs taken from a low angle to make the proportions of the models even more spectacular… These representations were frankly problematic.

Instagram account Awkward Zara did not fail to alert on these pictures: “This collection celebrating a plastic doll of unrealistic proportions for a human is unsuited to the current context, with its artistic direction giving way to low angle photographs, which lengthen the bodies to such an extent that they appear distorted”, can we read the publication. Indeed, while some brands try to go in the direction of the bodypositive movement, Zara did not wish to represent bodies in all their plurality and diversity.

If these more than skinny silhouettes shock us, the last thing is that this collaboration between Zara and Barbie serves an a priori noble goal. The profits from these sales will in fact be donated to an association campaigning for the right to education and access to culture for underprivileged children, Entreculturas. It’s missed! And that’s a shame, because Barbie is also the doll that can be whoever she wants, a strong symbolism for children, but completely invisible in this collection.

Melanie Bonvard

Mélanie deciphers pop culture from a societal angle and questions the female gaze in films or even series, because everything is a question of gaze, she …