Panavision Pink
There’s more to the color pink than My Little Pony and ballerinas
Pink is one of the most divisive colors, yet attitudes toward the hue are changing as it shifts to something increasingly regarded as cool and androgynous. Although popularly associated with little girls, ballerinas and all things feminine, the stereotype of “pink for girls and blue for boys” only really gained traction in the United States in the mid-20th century; the symbolism of pink has varied greatly across world history.
It’s no small irony that by the 18th century, pink was a new and highly fashionable unisex color in Europe, in contrast to the 19th and 20th centuries, when pink became coded as a feminine color. The New York Fashion Institute of Technology’s perky exhibition Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color starts from the 18th-century premise, with a section titled “Pompadour Pink” featuring several 18thcentury ensembles, including a woman’s pink robe à la Française, a man’s pink habit à la Française and a man’s pink banyan. By the 18th century, pink had also become a key component of painting and interior design.
By placing men’s, women’s and children’s pink clothing from both Western and non-Western cultures (including those across Africa, India, Mexico and Japan) in a historical context, the show corrects popular misconceptions, and encourages viewers to question clichés and received opinion. Ultimately, it demonstrates that “it is society that ‘makes’ color, defines it and gives it meaning”, to quote the color historian Michel Pastoureau.
In India, for example, pink has long been worn by both men and women, while in Mexico, the color Rosa Mexicano is associated with national identity. Western designers have drawn on these associations; as the famed fashion editor Diana Vreeland once said, “Pink is the navy blue of India.” Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli’s Shocking Pink was explicitly associated, in her mind, with Asia and Latin America. There’s also a small section on the pink-versus-blue gender coding in children’s wear, a binary that was still in flux in the late 1920s, when opinion was divided as to whether pink was for boys or for girls. The final decision seems to have been influenced by publicity surrounding a millionaire’s purchase of the paintings Blue Boy and Pinkie. Reproductions of these are featured along with that of another 18th-century painting, Pink Boy. The exhibition also traces declensions of pink; for example, how around 1900, pale pinks implied delicate, aristocratic femininity, while by 1912, a vibrant cherry pink was thought exotic. And while the 1920s is often referenced by Gabrielle Chanel’s Little Black Dress, pink in all iterations rose to popularity, crowned by Schiaparelli in the 1930s.
A second gallery expands audience perspectives on pink and illustrates how designers are challenging traditional thought about the color — such as Rei Kawakubo, the radical creative force behind Comme des Garçons, who has been influential with avant-garde collections such as Biker/Ballerina and 18th-Century Punk. The house of Valentino even recently produced T-shirts proclaiming that “Pink is Punk”. Never has pink seemed so Panavision after this show in New York, which runs until January 2019.