On Day to Night Barbie

Margot Robbie served a head-turning number of iconic Barbie looks before the SAG-AFTRA strike shut down the press tour for “Barbie,” Greta Gerwig’s plastic-lined comedy tour de force (I loved it), including a Hervé Léger minidress styled after the original Barbie’s default outfit, a black-and-white striped one-piece swimsuit. But it was her outfit on the red carpet for the Seoul premiere that made me gasp: Margot dressed as Day to Night Barbie, my favorite Barbie, who hit the shelves in 1985 when I was nine, pretty much the best age for a Barbie player to be. As a kid, Day to Night Barbie captivated me, both in concept and in execution.

The concept here is that Barbie is both committed to her work and so equally busy with fabulous evening plans that she doesn’t even have time to go home and change, so she needs one outfit that can, with modifications, take her from the office to the club or a gala or whatever Barbie did at night—whatever the hell she wanted to do, I knew that much at nine.

The mechanics are simple and effective: She wears a hot pink suit over a sparkly tank obscured by an even pinker chiffon scarf. (There’s also a “business hat” for some reason, I blame 1985.) She stashes elbow-length satin gloves and an evening clutch in her Barbie briefcase, along with peep-toe heels. She ditches the jacket, turns her skirt inside-out to reveal a hot-pink tulle overskirt, ties the chiffon scarf around her waist for even more poufy volume, and swaps out her sensible pumps for the heels and finishes swapping out her accessories. Et voilà! Barbie has put away the day and is ready for the night. Day to Night Barbie’s transforming outfit appealed to my love of secret compartments and other hidden delights. And at some point, while turning her skirt inside-out, I began to imagine the life I would make as an adult: My very own Day to Night Barbie adventures.   

As “Barbie” the movie makes clear, Barbie has had many occupations and vocations over the years, but I didn’t care about Veterinarian Barbie or Astronaut Barbie or Barbie of the Rockers, bless her derivative heart. Day to Night Barbie, though—she stuck with me. She gave me a blueprint: Work in some kind of climate-controlled office with a computer and a desk during the day and have so many fun places to go at night there’s no point in stopping between. My parents worked in a hospital and a steel mill and came home to three kids fighting over the TV remote. I thank them for it but I knew that wasn’t for me. I would need at least one college degree and I would need to live somewhere else, where Night Barbie had more options than going to the mall or cruising the park. That was about all I knew at nine, but it was enough.

Unlike a lot of my childhood fantasies, Day to Night Barbie sort of came true. So yes, often I was going from one work to the next—Office Barbie, after a day of client meetings and desk work and staff trainings, transforming into Arts Critic Barbie, heading out to the theater or a gallery or to a concert or even to a bar to review a new cocktail menu. My friends and I literally call this move “Day to Night Barbie”: Wear some kind of basic dress (probably black) as a foundation, and swap out the office-appropriate cardigan or blazer for fun jewelry, change shoes and bag and your makeup in the office bathroom mirror, and you’re all set. I don’t think Drew even knew that Day to Night Barbie had been an actual Mattel toy, but he knows the reference.

So while I had kept the concept of Day to Night Barbie in my vernacular long after her cultural relevance had expired, what I didn’t realize is how much of the promise of Day to Night Barbie I had internalized as a child and carried over into my adult life. Day to Night Barbie is not the mechanics of her transformation; Day to Night Barbie was a promise of the independent, climate-controlled life that would be the payoff for the deeply unpopular at the time choice to be good at school, if nothing else, because I didn’t come from the kind of town or family where college and an office job was the absolute default. I knew I was going to have to find my way there. My family helped me realize my vision, and I’m so grateful to them for it. I suppose there’s something fitting about Day Barbie’s utterly generic job, as I didn’t really have a clear picture of what I wanted to do, exactly, other than “something where I get to write, and to talk to people about interesting things.” (Of course I ended up at a liberal arts school; also, “interesting things” were and remain relative.)

I’m only in the office for a few days at a time these days, but being a carry-on traveler for work trips means I still put together Day to Night Barbie outfits, even if I usually manage to drop my laptop off at the hotel before meeting friends in the city after a day at work. Most of the time I’m Work from Home Barbie, more likely to swap out soft pants for seams on my way out the door in the evening, which happens way less frequently anyway. But when I saw photos of Margot wearing the hot pink suit—with business hat!—on the Seoul red carpet, I was nine years old again in an instant, with only the vaguest idea of what the future I desperately wanted could be. So I did the thing Gen X does: I went online and found her again — a Day to Night Barbie whose accessories were still all intact — and I bought her.

And then I saw that Day to Night Barbie had a playset, which I didn’t even know about as a kid: A studio apartment on one side that transforms into an office on the other. And I bought Barbie her home, too.

She arrived the weekend my siblings and I took all the nieces, the youngest of whom is nine, to see “Barbie,” a movie that made me cry more than once, and laugh so hard I am surprised my nieces are still talking to me, because we are frightfully loud public laughers in my family, it’s true. I have her set up in my home office, which it turns out is actually attached to my bedroom now. Who could have predicted that in 1985?

I’m not much of a collector of these kinds of things. I definitely did not want a doll still in the box (my wallet thanks me) because the point of toys is to play with them. (That’s why I do not still have my own Day to Night Barbie from childhood; I was not interested in the fetishization of my toys and probably sold her at a yard sale for pocket money the year I turned 12.)

What Day to Night Barbie really gave me permission to dream about was options: Not one career path, one hobby or interest, but any of them, all of them, as long as you could do them in hot pink heels and tulle. I feel like Greta’s “Barbie” tapped into that feeling of possibility, and the disorienting pain of realizing that the world might have other ideas for you. I’m keeping Day to Night Barbie in my home office as a reminder that I can choose my own path, and that I should probably get out more often at night.

If you played with Barbies as a kid, who was your Barbie?