Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
When it came time to design the look for the new Barbie movie, director Greta Gerwig and her team took their inspiration from many different sources. They studied films like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985) and An American in Paris (1951), the whimsy of Wayne Thiebaud’s pop art paintings and the stylish mid-century architecture of Richard Neutra. But when it came to the film’s colour palette, Gerwig was single-minded – pink would play a starring role. “I wanted the pinks to be very bright,” says Gerwig, “and everything to be almost too much.”
On the Warner Bros. lot in London, England, Gerwig’s production team got to work fashioning a world brimming with pink props, clothing and sets. They even created a pink Barbie convertible car that drives on pink roads. For advice on the perfect pink for the movie they turned to their paint supplier Rosco. After much consultation, the Rosco paint experts narrowed the selection from 100 to 10 hues of pink. Then something unexpected happened; the pink paint supply suddenly dried up. Because the film was in production during the COVID-19 pandemic, the global supply chain was in disarray, leaving the world with a shortage of pink paint, one the film Barbie helped create. Eventually, they found enough pink to complete the sets and Barbie’s pink world was born. As the American pop singer Miley Cyrus once said, “Pink isn’t just a color. It's an attitude too.”