Sustainability in Barbie Land: ThredUP Taps the Film’s Costume Designer for Barbiecore Collection

While most of Barbie’s world is made of fossil fuel-derived plastics, thredUP wants fans to ditch new—often petrochemical-based—Barbiecore fast fashions in favor of a more sustainable way to participate in the hot pink trend: secondhand shopping.

The online thrift store is working with Jacqueline Durran, the new film’s Oscar-winning costume designer, to put together a 250-piece collection of bright-colored, era-spanning, Barbie-inspired looks.

Durran handpicked the items from thredUP’s inventory, and an AI-powered tool will repopulate the collection with similar garments and accessories as fans scoop up her selections. Durran’s picks will be available on thredUP starting July 21.

“We consistently look for these ‘waste watcher’ moments,” explained Erin Wallace, vp of marketing at thredUP. “[Barbie] is a movie, it is a trend, but it’s also encouraging consumers to participate in single-use fashion—disposable fashion—at a massive scale. And we’d love to take that and flip the narrative and participate in the same trend, in the same cultural moment, but in a way that is sustainable.”

The tie-up with Barbie is part of an ongoing strategy to use cultural moments to introduce more people to the world of resale—a tactic that’s helped thredUP inch toward profitability in recent years amid its effort to interrupt a clothing culture rooted in fast fashion. It’s an effort that sustainability experts applaud, with the caveat that secondhand shopping alone can’t fix the environmental and human rights disasters fueled by fast fashion.

Over the last few years, thredUP has partnered with White Lotus star Haley Lu Richardson, Gossip Girl costume designer Eric Daman and celebrity stylist Karla Welch, each of whom built custom secondhand collections for the platform. Ahead of the 2022 holiday season, thredUP worked with The Nanny’s Fran Drescher and zero-waste designer Daniel Silverstein to create new pieces from unsold thredUP inventory. In 2021, costume designers Molly Rogers and Danny Santiago worked with thredUP to source designer pieces for Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That.

“Overwhelmingly, these campaigns do reach new audiences for us,” she said, but wouldn’t share specific figures. “Our focus is really on bringing new people into the thredUP world who either have never shopped on thredUP or even never shopped secondhand.”

Fashion’s climate mess

But while the spirit of the campaign is a positive one, experts warned that secondhand shopping alone can’t address the harms generated by the culture and industry of fast fashion.

“Promoting resale and reuse is a good thing overall, the goal being to keep already extracted materials in use for longer,” Lynda Grose, professor of fashion design and critical studies at California College of the Arts, told Adweek. Theoretically, she explained, resale could reduce the need to extract new materials.

But despite the rise of resale-as-a-service platforms like thredUP, “no one’s resale business—including Patagonia’s—is displacing their new product production,” Grose said. “And unless that displacement happens, ecological impacts and carbon emissions will continue to increase.”

Carbon emissions generated by the apparel industry are estimated to make up somewhere between 1.8 and 10% of global emissions. Despite wider adoption of sustainable practices and programs, the industry’s footprint continues to grow year over year. At the same time, the portion of new garments made of petrochemical-based synthetic materials has skyrocketed to over 60%.

“We should be teaching children that one-off outfits are unsustainable and simultaneously name and shame those providers who are creating all this merchandise for which we have no place in the landfills,” said CB Bhattacharya, Zoffer chair of sustainability and ethics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Still, amid the sea of bright pink, petrochemical-based merchandise accompanying the new Greta Gerwig film, thredUP’s sustainability-focused campaign is a rarity.

“As a former vintage seller and designer known for period pieces, I’m passionate about reimagining the old and turning it into something entirely new,” Durran said in a statement.