After Ash, it's Katrina as Barbie!

How cute can a fashion event get?

Apparently, very, very cute... if you’ve got Barbie kicking it off, as the Lakme Fashion Week Fall/Winter’09 that starts in Mumbai today does. At 1 pm, the world’s most popular and admired fashion icon celebrates her 50th anniversary by showcasing the best in fashion design talent across the globe.

Yes, after making an unforgettable style statement at New York’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, Barbie will now walk the ramp at India’s foremost fashion event. This show called Barbie – All Doll’d Up! is the style sweetheart’s first in India and will showcase real-size, Barbie-inspired looks put together by renowned fashion designers from across the country including Wendell Rodricks, Neeta Lulla, Shantanu & Nikhil, Vikram Phadnis and others.

Barbie boasts five decades of fashion heritage, working with more fashion designers than any other brand in the world, and in the process becoming a star admired by major couturiers who dream to get their names associated with the most popular doll in history.

Taking off from New York, the world famous brand invited Indian designers to a contest to celebrate Barbie’s 50th birthday by creating designs with the doll as their muse. The winning designer (who will be announced today at the fashion show) was then invited to design the finale outfit of the event for a one-of-a-kind Barbie doll... and walking the ramp as the showstopper wearing that outfit today will be Bollywood actress Katrina Kaif.

Katrina is delighted with the honour, more so because a Barbie doll bearing likeness to the Bollywood actress is in the pipeline and will come as a great surprise to the world sometime soon. “Every girl at some point of time in her childhood has played with a Barbie doll,” admitted Katrina, “and so have I. She makes a sweet, fun and lively companion.”

It is true, Barbie is the world’s only brand that allows girls to imagine themselves as a mermaid to a movie star, a fairy to a fashionista, and a princess to a president, serving a purpose to girls as they try on different personalities, careers, and explore the world and all of its possibilities without ever having to leave home. She allows girls to dream beyond and know that a woman has choices, having herself represented more than 100 careers in her lifetime.