Pink Saga... nº1 (Introduction)

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As an introduction, let me get this straight first : Pink is no more for girls than for boys ! Colors have of course naturally no gender. If Pink is mainly associated with girls nowadays (to an overdose point, right ? Who wants to live in a stereotyped monochrome environment ?) it was not always so until reasonably recently...

What can you see in this picture ?

"Promenade des Enfants" - Timoléon Lobrichon, end of 19th century - France

Two rows of infant school children on their way for a promenade (in the gardens of Tuileries in Paris)...
Some are in pink and some are in blue, and they walk in two lines nearly neatly sorted out by color...
Where are the girls and where are the boys ? What do you think ?
Well think twice... as the girls are probably in blue and the boys in pink !

Pink, a color derived from red, was in the past symbolically linked to qualities traditionally attributed to boys at the time : strength, will, courage, etc.

Here is a portrait of a boy in the 18th century :

Master Nicholls (The Pink Boy), 1782 by Thomas Gainsborough

And just in case you wonder this is a boy too !

1830 (Austria)

The mutation of pink as en exclusive girl color occurred around 1940... Then a break between mid 60s to mid 80s (the unisex years) and Wroooommmmm ! from then on to the excess we now know...

Picasso - The Actor (1904) - Période Rose...

"Our human societies "make" the color, give it definition and meanings, construct its codes and values" (See Michel Pastoureau, our history of colors specialist in France, who incidentally counts in his own family Claude Levi-Strauss). He might also have stated on another occasion "I hate pink" and even if I can totally understand why he might have said it, I myself don't... there are thousands of shades of pink and two or three I really love (I love blue too and many other colors). One pink in particular hit the spot when well combined with black... Let's talk more about it and first let's talk about the period when pink made it big and was still sometimes tasteful : the 50s...

(coming next and soon in Pink Saga nº2)...

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