Minnie Mouse Gets 'Skinny' Barneys Makeover After The Little Mermaid's Plastic Surgery: Is Altering Disney Character's Bodies Bad For Kids?

Barneys is collaborating with Disney to create its holiday 2012 window displays, WWD reports.

Six Barneys New York executives, including CEO Mark Lee, creative director Dennis Freedman and senior vice president Charlotte Blechman, traveled to Disneyland to be inspired for their high-fashion Disney idea.

The window will be called "Electric Holiday" and will be unveiled to the public on Nov. 14, at Barneys' Madison Avenue flagship by Oscar-winning composer Michael Giacchino.

Last year, Lady Gaga was the inspiration for the holiday window.

"This is a lot of fun," said Freedman. "[Gaga's Workshop] was a little bit of a hard act to follow, but one of the names that came up was Disney."

Freedman described why Barneys worked so closely with Disney, "The world of the Paris fashion shows, of fashion, of people in fashion, of the rituals, all of the idiosyncrasies. The important thing to me was always that it had to be authentic. It really had to hit the nail on the head in every detail."

"What is really important in the film is getting all of the details of how that world works," Freedman said. "That was the real challenge and involved a whole education process.

"The animator and I sat next to each other and went over every detail of the clothes - how they're made, what material, how they would move - to get them as accurate as we possibly could."

But the minute attention to detail had to be ended at some point. "When we got to the moment when all Disney characters walk on the runway, there was a discussion," Freedman recalled. "The standard Minnie Mouse will not look so good in a Lanvin dress. There was a real moment of silence, because these characters don't change. I said, 'If we're going to make this work, we have to have a 5-foot-11 Minnie,' and they agreed. When you see Goofy, Minnie and Mickey, they are runway models."

Freedman explained he took a model "to walk the hallways of Disney, and they studied how she walked. I said, 'You can't make the film without understanding every detail of how she walks, what her facial expression is, and how she stares ahead.'"

"This project is very different from any other we have done in the past," said Luis Fernandez, senior vice president of creative for Disney Consumer Products. "For the most part, labels have asked to come into our archives for ideas, and then interpret what we do. This is the perfect marriage between both our companies. The fact that we are getting most of our characters dressed by the best fashion houses out there is pretty incredible."

News that Minnie and other beloved Disney characters are getting a "skinny" makeover so they can enter the world of high-fashion comes just after Venezuela Clinica Dempere in Mexico made advertisements that featured iconic children's characters like The Little Mermaid and the Wicked Witch of the West with reconstructed faces and bodies.

"We make fairy tales come true," the pictures of the altered characters said.

Young girls today are overwhelmed with the pressure to look beautifully perfect. Is the pressure becoming even stronger by changing the faces of their childhood idols?