Some of you may have seen on our Instagram last week that Hudson's Bay Company has released the collab of our dreams, Hayley Elsaesser X Barbie! This capsule collection is sold exclusively at The Bay online, and several physical locations (Queen St W. in Toronto, Centre-Ville in Montreal, Chinook in Calgary, and Downtown in Vancouver).
When we are kids our imagination knows no bounds. We can dream as big as we want. We picture ourselves in the driver’s seat. Kids don’t pretend to be court jesters, they imagine that they are kings and queens. We don’t picture settling into a mundane day-to-day life and living for reality TV, we imagine being the ones on the TV, inventing new machines, creating new works of art, and changing the world. As we grow older we are told we need to fall in line. We need to be more feminine. More of a ‘real man’. Girls can’t sit like that. Boys can’t play with dolls. We learn to take direction. We learn we shouldn’t speak out of turn. Even our fairy tales prescribe lives of careful and methodical plodding. The Tortoise and The Hare. The Ant and The Grasshopper. We are taught from a young age to compare ourselves to others and prepare for the worst. I am here to tell you that dreams do come true. When 4 year old me said one day she was going to make clothes for Barbie, it would have sounded like a pipe dream. If my mom had said ‘don’t be unrealistic’ instead of teaching me to sew, it would have been. If when I wanted to do science experiments, or build things my mom had said, ‘girls don’t do that’ I wouldn’t be writing this. If Ruth Handler hadn’t questioned why her daughter, Barbara only had the option of playing with baby dolls rather than envisioning herself grown up, the world would be different. If I didn’t have strong female role models to look up to, I wouldn’t be the woman I am today. I am living proof that you CAN be anything you want to. I’m so beyond thrilled to announce my new collection with Barbie, available exclusively at Hudson’s Bay. Barbie inspired me to create, and I’ve taken that inspiration and put it into this collection. I hope you guys like it. Let me know what inspires you!
- Hayley
Models: Shelby Guertin, Avery Barsony, Kat Khan, Sam Yang