top of page

One day my prince will come...

This is placeholder text. To change this content, double-click on the element and click Change Content.

"One day my Prince will come" is the name for this project, which clones one single classical Barbie stiletto shoe many times in many different colors. The title is a reference to Miles Davis’ song (as many of my projects do refer to music) but also to the story of Cinderella, waiting for her prince to come, with only one shoe :))

The original Barbie shoe has been x-rayed scanned - at the Department of Robotics at Cornell University - and then it’s been scaled to human proportions with a 3D software. The file has been then 3D-printed to obtain the final prototype.


I’ve tried different materials like ceramics at first, but ended up using glass (following the Cinderella thread with her glass sleaper).


The idea for the presentation is a row of 7 of the same Barbie shoe at human scale, each one in a different color, like their catalogues, forming a rainbowee color palette. One for each day of the week (like those panties with the days of the week written on them, which I always really loved).

The bright colors, the orderly scaled disposition and the glass shoes, appeal to a certain commercial feminine ideal of beauty, control and happiness (à la David Lynch), the title is associated with passivity and the idea of waiting and longing. The irony in the multiple choice relates to the fallacy of love in a world where women are not really choosing. All the choices in advertisment are geared to give the ilusion of choosing. Barbie at first sight is not really that women (she’s more independent and self-assured), but she is, since all her persona plays on the visual and sexual seduction as her major appeal; ingredients to ultimately land a good Prince as the finality of women’s existence.


The whole project is a humorous prank on the old expectations on women, through a very seductive display. Barbie is part of that universe. I myself had 15 Barbie dolls growing up, so it’s not a mere critique, it’s more complex than that. It’s about who we are and who we don’t want to be as women. All mixed up, as those things normally are.


Project Gallery

Idée Fixe  is a Transdisciplinary Studio of Art and Architecture, run by Cristina Guadalupe Galván.

If in a website you normally find finished objects and products to share, what we are sharing here are more ideas – tested, developed and lived -- and their processes, that in many instances ended up happily physical. The creative process is about experimentation and the life that goes with it. The life and the people.

While building this site I came across a quote that explained it to me much better, by architects Josep Ferrando & Marta Poch, for their Quaderns d´Arquitectura, issue 273, THE THINKING TRADE:

      In a world dominated by images of the finished object and the immediacy of access to multimedia content, this issue of Quaderns sets out to reflect on the role of the architect –by means of their working processes, of the working methods (…) leaving the image of the built project on the background.

For artist Sol LeWitt, the process was also the work:

      The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. (...) It is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned. 

Architect Josep Maria Sostres said something similar:

      The project, obviously as a mental conception, as a will to form, has a sovereignty, it has an internal power that must be imposed.

So this archive-website of Idee-Fixe, records more these ideas, processes and in many instances the collaborations that made them possible.

It´s about THE LIFE OF IDEAS.

bottom of page