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A Barbie Doll Is Taking on the Shallowness of Pacific Northwest Culture

Life in #plastic, it’s #fantastic #kinfolk #getoutside #vsco #pdx.

One of my favorite things of the Pacific Northwest (or just the West really) isn't so much the "great outdoors" or the laidbackness of its attendant peoples, but how readily parodied it is. It's no wonder Portlandia resonated with people like me—the people feeding into the mythical rustic, American heritage white fantasy culture are fish in a barrel, and the latest gun to be loaded against them is Socality Barbie, an Instagram feed of Barbie rendered in stereotypical PNW fashion.

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If you've been on Instagram for a while you'll know the network is rife with perfectly composed shots with faded veneers that suggest you're "quite above using the default filters, thank you very much." But most of them boil down to little more more than West Coast lifestyle glamor shots with the occasional bit of product placement. It's perfect FOMO fuel, until you realize that almost all posts on social media are either posturing or marketing, whether intended or not.

The smugness doesn't stop at lifestyle posts either: publications like Kinfolk are even in the account's crosshairs.

Socality Barbie's especially clever considering that the Barbie doll's been the banner-bearer for impossible standards for years—it's basically been the American Dream for little girls since its inception. But to see it rehashed and parodied into the impossibly glamorous lives of white people who spend an inordinate amount of time marketing the outdoors: that's more refreshing than a latte on top of cliff in Yosemite.