Powdery, soft, warm, joyful, playful, comforting, frivolous, hopeful, erotic: the colour pink has lots of associations, mostly feminine. Today, the colour is as prevalent as ever in the fashion world, with its most dazzling iteration, hot pink, swathing runways and high street stores at once. How has this controversial and divisive colour maintained such power considering its links with femininity, though, and what has hot pink come to symbolise today?
Pink has had numerous meanings throughout history, many of them contradictory and many of them surprising. The colour was granted its name in the 1700s, when a Greek botanist noted that the ruffled edges of carnations looked as though they had been cut with pinking shears, naming the colour of the flowers in tribute to this phenomenon. In recent decades paler pink in particular is associated with girlishness and youth, but in the 1700s was a symbol of luxury and class among aristocratic men and women alike; because pink is a paler shade of red, a military colour, it was actually seen as more suitable for boys. Pink was used in art up until and during this period but was used to symbolise health, youth, innocence, intimacy and romance rather than femininity.
It wasn’t until the mid-19th century when men began wearing darker colours, leaving more vibrant colours to women, that pink was increasingly viewed as delicate, feminine, and frothy. As the dye that created pink clothing isn’t found in nature, it had up until this point been reserved for the wealthier classes, who could afford the imported dye of cochineal that created pink clothing. At the turn of the 20th century, pink switched from being a symbol of wealth to one of vulgarity. As the mass production of cheaper, synthetic magenta dyes increased, pink’s reputation decreased, aligning the colour with the lower classes and prostitutes. It was around this time that the colour developed its first erotic connotations, but always in relation to women’s bodies, solidifying it as a colour of feminine frivolity and inferiority.
Paul Poiret can be credited with bringing pink back into fashion, creating dresses in a variety of pink hues, and in 1931, Elsa Schiaparelli produced her signature colour, which she named ‘Brilliant Pink,’ by mixing magenta with a small about of white:
‘The colour flashed in front of my eyes. Bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life-giving, like all the lights and the birds and the fish in the world put together, a colour of China and Peru but not of the West- a shocking colour, pure and undiluted.’
After being injected with hope, pink took a dark turn during the war. The Nazis adopted pink triangles as a signifier of people they labelled ‘sexual criminals:’ homosexual men, bisexual men and transgender women. Not only did this most likely discourage men from wearing the colour after the war, but in perhaps the greatest marketing ploy known to humankind, pink was used to reestablish traditional gender roles, linking it with motherhood, domesticity, passivity and womanhood. This was helped along greatly by First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, who wore a pink gown as her inaugural dress, and swathed across the White House so extensively that it was nicknamed ‘The Pink Palace’ during her husband’s presidency, a move that has been credited as solidifying the gendering of pink.
Whilst this is, honestly, a power move I can firmly get behind, this gendering of pink is to blame for a subsequent slew of negative associations with the colour as the 20th century progressed. Not least of all is the fact that if you’re as much of a fan of the colour pink as I am, whilst also self-identifying as a feminist, I’m sure you’ve been on the receiving end of commentary about how you can’t possibly wear pink and call yourself a feminist (I mean, surely everyone knows that colour preference and political views are mutually exclusive?!) Pink was once again associated with the LGBT community in the 1980s when the AIDs crisis was commonly referred to as the ‘pink plague,’ prompting people to reappropriate the pink triangle as a symbol of empowered and proud sexuality. Similarly, pink later became the colour of breast cancer awareness, women’s reproductive rights, and women’s rights more broadly, creating divisions amongst women’s rights advocates when protestors at the Women’s March on Washington in 2017 knit and wore hot pink ‘pussy hats.’ Washington Post journalist Petula Dvorak warned “Please, sisters, back away from the pink[…] This is serious stuff,’ somehow perpetuating the idea that hot pink reflects a ‘terminal lack of seriousness,’ as if pink were solely responsible for women being legally subjugated and protests of this fact not being taken seriously
In the 2000s hot pink proliferated in the girls’ aisle of toy stores. After pink had so long been prescribed to women as a symbol of their inferior domesticity, it is somewhat refreshing that toys such as Barbie and characters such as Elle Woods were beginning to do the work of remarketing pink as representative of the new era of independent, joyful, slightly campy and rebellious femininity. While controversial, and taking its sweet time to diversify its dolls’ skin tones and body shapes, Barbie’s philosophy promoted that a young girl could be anything they wanted to be through their doll: from the first female President of the United States, to an astronaut, a ballerina or a beauty queen:
“For Barbie, pink represents limitless potential and is a symbol of female empowerment, which is such a perfect fit with the brand’s purpose.” (Kim Culmone, SVP of Design for Barbie)
It’s no surprise, then, that with the rise of trends like bimbo and Barbiecore in recent years, hot pink is making a bold comeback to the fashion world amongst people of all genders. Inspired by the reclamation of pink as a symbol for sexual and reproductive rights in the 1980s and beyond, TikTokers, such as Chrissy Chlapecka, proudly don hot pink, along with a variety of other hues, whilst encouraging young ‘she, theys, and baes’ to be sluts, and call out men on the internet for their lack of voice in the aftermath of Roe v Wade being overturned. Meanwhile, outside of the internet, it seems as though every day a different celebrity steps out swathed in hot pink as Valentino’s Fall Winter 2022 collection takes over the world. Harry Styles, Sebastian Stan and Lizzo are amongst these celebrities, and most recently, Anne Hathaway wore a sparkly hot pink mini dress and titteringly high-heeled patent platform shoes to the Cannes Film Festival, providing the illusion of having a minuscule torso and impossibly long legs, like Barbie herself. Florence Pugh also wore a hot pink dress from the Valentino collection, promptly taking to Instagram to correct the slew of outrage that cropped up around her nipples being exposed by the sheer hot pink fabric; once again binding hot pink with calls for women’s bodily autonomy. Pierpaolo Piccioli, creative director of Valentino, said of his collection that he chose hot pink to subvert its cultural meanings; this is where hot pink has its political footing solidified. Wearing hot pink becomes synonymous with challenging the rigidities of gender and sexual politics today; boldly queering societal perceptions of femininity and sexuality and proving that colour, like gender, is a cultural construct– a blank canvas for meaning to be ascribed to.
Pink is not a trivial matter. Its tumultuous history provides the space for hot pink to be liberatory through its reimaginings of femininity. It’s joyful, bold, and hard to ignore— something which its wearers need a little more of in today’s world where femininity is at risk; where our sexual and bodily rights and autonomy are being threatened and, in some cases, almost entirely revoked.
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