When the trailer for Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” movie was first released, Google Trend searches for fluffy mules shot up 115 percent. This was, of course, largely inspired by the trailer’s scene featuring Margot Robbie’s Barbie stepping out of her pink stilettos and into a tip-toe pose, a reference to the doll’s signature stance due to her perpetually frozen feet. (In 2015, Mattel began making Barbie dolls with adjustable ankles so she could finally relax — and wear flats.)
With a wardrobe now spanning 64 years worth of fashion, she’s had her pick of footwear, but Barbie has been closely associated with the stiletto mule — also called the stiletto slide or sandal — since her inception.
It’s clear that shoes are an important totem in Barbieland; in the movie, Barbie’s feet, or what happens to them, serve as a key plotline. When it becomes clear that her arches have fallen, it’s a bad omen. When she seeks wisdom from Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie, she must choose between pink pumps or brown Birkenstocks, seemingly à la the infamous red pill-blue pill dilemma in “The Matrix.”
And throughout the film’s meticulously thought-out press tour, Robbie has been knocking out look after Barbie-themed look, with designer pieces frequently paired with high-heeled mules custom designed by Manolo Blahnik — like a take on the 1964 “Sparkling Pink” Barbie, for example, which Robbie replicated for a press conference in Seoul, South Korea.
“When you walk in mules, you walk a bit differently…Madame de Pompadour in her mules, walking around Versailles, click click click,” Blahnik once quipped. “Can you think of anything more exquisite?”
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