The fashion renaissance of pink: the history of pink in video - Marie Claire
By Mélody ThomasShareSend by email
It is often said that fashion is an eternal restart, but do we really know its history? This is what we want to tell you in “Renaissance mode”, our video series deciphering the trends that have marked the industry from its beginnings (and much earlier still) to our wardrobes.
In this second episode, we tell you the story of pink. A color that we see everywhere in recent seasons on fashion shows and that has marked the history of fashion as much as the great History. We could cite the pink tweed suit worn by Jackie Onassis during the assassination of President Kennedy or the one worn, in 1994, by Hilary Clinton in what will remain engraved in the annals as the "Pink Suit Conference". continues to make people talk – to the point of having its own exhibition in New York in 2018, Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color – it is also because color has been strongly gendered and politicized . From the 1950s, it became a commercial color and in the 1980s, it was particularly associated with the feminine gender.
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On this subject, if we dwell on the way in which pop culture has presented pink to us for decades, we notice that it is often associated with a form of femininity considered superficial. Just look at fictional characters like Elle Wood (A Blonde's Revenge) or Cher from Clueless. Pink is the color of the woman-child, still subject to the male gauze, to understand the male gaze. "The insistence on socializing women to identify with a color that does not exist in the 'real world' is, to me, a testament to the patriarchal hierarchies that work to keep women submissive in life. daily" declared in 2006 the American artist Signe Pierce.
But fashion has always loved taking things out of context, giving them new meaning. Barbara Nemitz, co-author of the book Pink: The Exposed Color in Contemporary Art and Culture comments: "Pink is now emancipated from the color of harmlessness, kindness, sweetness, innocence and oppressed". And to affirm: "She has acquired an active and powerful role". She cites the color's recent appearance in a number of activist protests, from pink-hued pussyhats at anti-Trump marches in the United States to the Gulabi Gang in India. But it will be necessary to wait until the 2010s for the color to take on a political hue; of Melania Trump's pussy pink blouse at the Pussy Hats March 2017 Women's March.
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