(Dominique Grisard)

Pink

Girls today seem to be naturally attracted to the colour pink. Historical research, however, proves that pink has only recently become a girl’s colour. Throughout the 19th century, it was virtually impossible to tell little girls and boys apart by the colour of their clothes. In fact, as late as the 1940s, both middle-class girls and boys were dressed in pink and other pastel shades. It was not at all uncommon to come across pictures of “boys’ clothing in pink merino” adorned with pink bows in women’s fashion magazines such as Peterson’s. In fact, until well into the 20th century, there were cultures that considered pink to be a lighter gradation of red and associated this with the blood of war (whereas light blue was the colour in which the Virgin Mary was most often depicted in Christian iconography). Pink was thus considered appropriate for boys. Even until the end of the Second World War, middle-class boys and girls were dressed in decidedly similar colours. Childhood was considered a time of innocence in middle-class and upper-class circles, and their innocence seemed most likely to be preserved by avoiding unduly gendering them by means of colour and clothing. Paintings of little boys dressed in pink, such as Thomas Gainsborough’s The Pink Boy (1782), were consequently neither rare nor strange.

From: Dominique Grisard, “Die Un*Möglichkeiten von Rosa”, in: Nici Jost, Instinctive Desire, edition fink, Zürich 2019, p. 124.