The Shania Twain Barbie Is a Dream Come True

Within the phrases of our Canadian icon: “Let’s go, women!”

Shania Twain has lengthy been an icon beloved for her musical expertise, unforgettable performances, singular model and sense of humour. It’s becoming, then, that the Canadian singer would have that standing cemented, not in one other Grammy Award or induction into the Canadian Music Corridor of Fame (Twain was already provided that honour in 2011), however within the type of her very personal Barbie doll.

In honour of Worldwide Girls’s Day on March 8 and the model’s sixty fifth anniversary on March 9, Twain is one among eight girls world wide being celebrated as storytellers and alter makers as a part of Barbie’s 2024 Function Mannequin lineup. Alongside trailblazers like Viola Davis, Helen Mirren, and Kylie Minogue, Twain’s Barbie options the singer in a dressing up from the 1997 music video for her lady energy anthem “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!.” (Microphone and prime hat included.)

“I used to be very flattered,” Twain tells FASHION in regards to the information. The choice is particularly an honour given the 12 months that Barbie has had with the 2023 launch of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film, which reframed the well-known doll as a feminist icon and inspired younger women to see themselves as astronauts, presidents, and now, award-winning nation singers. “I’ve all the time felt that it’s a accountability to be a job mannequin of any sort, and it’s a privilege to characterize one thing optimistic and empowering,” Twain says.

Constructive and empowering is precisely what the Barbie model means to the singer, who sees these toys — and the world created round them — as the primary alternative through which kids, particularly younger women, can begin to dream. Twain is aware of it, as a result of it was as a younger lady rising up in suburban Ontario that she first began to dream of one thing greater than her hometown.

“If I put myself again to my earliest artistic recollections and what it meant to me to have the ability to use my creativeness, that was this free area to play and dream and never really feel the load of inhibition, [and] was actually the the place the place I found that there was potential to do one thing on the earth past the place I used to be, and perhaps even even past what I might even have imagined on the time,” Twain says.

For the newly minted Barbie, that creativeness didn’t essentially stem from enjoying with a favorite Barbie doll, or any Barbie in any respect for that matter (her household couldn’t all the time afford new toys). As a substitute, “my toys had been my guitar, getting a microphone, getting issues that had been associated to music, getting my first report participant,” Twain says. “So I created my very own Barbies. I used to be creating my very own Barbie world.”

And whereas she didn’t all the time have a bodily Barbie to play with, her music functioned in a lot the identical approach the long-lasting dolls do, permitting her to create tales and situations, write scripts about experiences outdoors her personal. “That is what you do while you’ve acquired a Barbie, you begin enjoying,” Twain says. “And enjoying lets you dream. It’s a free area. Alone with my Barbies, there have been no inhibitions. I might make up no matter story I wished. It was a no-judgment zone and actually helped develop my creativity.”

It’s particularly significant, 30 years into her profession, to be honoured as a storyteller, as a result of that’s how the singer has all the time seen herself, taking delight in creating distinct worlds and characters by means of her songs by means of her lyrics — and trend selections.

Whether or not it’s donning a cheetah-print catsuit and singing about Brad Pitt being a dud within the desert, driving by means of a Matrix-esque world whereas crooning about rekindling a romance, or strutting by means of a rustic diner asking a lover who else he’s been sleeping with, Twain likes to set a scene and transport her followers there. And it’s one thing she’ll proceed to do into the longer term. In Might, Twain is embarking on her first Las Vegas residency, “Shania Twain: Come On Over — The Las Vegas Residency,” a celebration of her profession that can inevitably wow followers and transport them to a different world — as a result of that’s what the singer does finest.

“I dwell to inform tales,” Twain says. “Storytelling is a complete different world that I discover each day of my life and luxuriate in very a lot.”