3 min readNew DelhiJul 21, 2023 10:00 AM IST
First published on: Jul 21, 2023 at 10:00 AM IST
Are you confused about whether to watch Barbie or Oppenheimer this weekend? Well, you’re not alone because our favourite young designer, Masaba Gupta, is too. Taking to Instagram, Masaba shared images of herself hopping on the Barbiecore bandwagon in a saturated pink look, while radiating Oppenheimer’s black-and-white energy in another look. “Part #barbie part #oppenheimer,” Masaba wrote in the caption.
In the first picture, she can be seen sporting a bubblegum pink sari from her collection with a matching pink bolero and huge pink-rimmed sunglasses. She completed the look with hot pink lip colour.
In the second picture, the Masaba Masaba actor is seen donning a black and white lehenga set with a jacket, another creation from her own label. The outfit perfectly embodied Oppenheimer’s grey world and aesthetics.
The ‘Barbenheimer’ fever has overtaken Twitter trends before Friday’s highly anticipated encounter at the box office. With the release of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer on the same day, i.e. July 21, fans are having a meme fest and trending the combination of the movies names ‘Barbenheimer’ with much glee.
The new phrase, which is a portmanteau of both films’ titles, has sparked great debate among fans due to how it represents the two films’ dimensionally opposing tones. The juxtaposition of Barbie, a fantasy comedy directed by Gerwig about the fashion doll Barbie, and Oppenheimer, a biographical thriller written and directed by Nolan about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons during WWII, elicited humorous reactions from netizens.
As a joke, people on social media started dressing up as Barbie dolls and then wearing dark-coloured costumes to highlight Oppenheimer’s aesthetic component with fashion designer Masaba being one of them. Check out her look:
The Barbiecore fashion trend has been dominating the fashion world since last year, reaching a peak this week with the Greta Gerwing-directed film slated to hit theatres on Friday. Many celebrities, both from Hollywood and Bollywood, have embraced this trend, with the film’s principal actor and the titular Barbie, Margot Robbie, leading the way.
Barbie features Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling in leading roles, while Oppenheimer is a biographical thriller starring Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr, Emily Blunt, and Matt Damon.
The Barbenheimer phenomenon is an example of counterprogramming, a marketing concept in which a tonally contrasting movie (in this case, Warner Bros.’ Barbie vs Universal’s Oppenheimer) is released on the same day as a popular film to appeal to an underrepresented population.
Universal used counterprogramming successfully as early as 2002 when it released the dramedy About a Boy alongside the science-fiction sequel, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. The former had the best opening for a British film that year, according to box office figures, grossing more than $130 million.
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Masaba shared images of herself hopping on the Barbiecore bandwagon in a saturated pink look, while radiating Oppenheimer's black and white energy in another look. (Source: Masaba Gupta/ Instagram) 
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