Jamie-Maree Shipton

There is a corner of the internet dedicated to vintage Barbie shoes. Specifically, it is a Reddit thread, devoted to collecting these miniature plastic heels so beloved by a fictional toy created in 1959. This is a community like no other, with their emotions ranging from elation: “My Barbie shoes finally arrived” someone emotes, to vague trolling of Barbie herself: “I'm actually surprised Barbie would wear those at 59”, another deadpans.

This might be a chat forum full of trivialities, but it’s no overgrown childlike obsession. No, this is fandom in its essence, a quixotic and romantic form of nostalgia that has awakened the imaginations of women across the world, apparently.

It’s this metaverse strain of culture that the art director and stylist Jamie-Maree Shipton decided to explore in her photo series that looks at the “culture around Barbie”. In her images, Jamie-Maree examines the “rawness of just dressing for no one but yourself, and how a great pair of shoes is just the icing on the cake”, she tells me, “so in that way, Barbie was a bit of inspiration – she was how a lot of girls learnt to play dress ups when they were young”.

An extremely controversial fictional character, Jamie-Marie captures the ways a Barbie doll’s dress-up characteristics encourage women to explore their own style and look at “the different characters we can be as girls, women just by embodying a different outfit.”.