Is pink a girl’s color?

Is pink a boy’s color?

In the past few years, pink has become a hot fashion choice for men. Pro basketball and soccer players are wearing pink shoes, rock stars like Machine Gun Kelly are wearing hot pink and playing pink guitars, and even football players are wearing pink to ostensibly raise awareness for breast cancer.

Some people are aghast at that.

But why?

Historically, that’s a very masculine choice.

In the 19th and 20th centuries up through the 1940s, pink was considered a color for boys, as it was the lighter version of red, which was considered a powerful color for men. Blue was actually considered a “more dainty” color and was considered feminine. So women would wear blue, girls light blue.

Of course, none of this mattered in the least until the industrial revolution and the widespread manufacture of dyes and dyed clothing. Prior to that, in the mid-1800s and before, infants and toddlers wore white dresses, regardless of their gender. This was because white was easy to bleach out stains, and the dress style made it far easier to change diapers. Given that most houses didn’t have indoor plumbing, potty training in its current form was not yet anywhere near as widespread as it is today, and it was far easier for boys and girls to not have to drop trou and instead just lift skirt.

The switch from pink as a masculine color to a feminine color began in the mid-late 1940s, as various trends from Europe began to permeate American society post-WW2. Even so, pink continued to be seen as a color of wealth and royalty and style, hence Elvis Presley and many other rock stars looking to drive pink Cadillacs and the preponderance of “little pink houses” in the suburbs in the 1950s. In fact, it wasn’t until the repressive and conservative ’50s that there was truly a clear delineation of pink as a feminine color and blue as a masculine one.

In the 1960s and ’70s however, that switched. Baby boomers, rebelling against culture norms and sexist programming, rejected the ideas that any color could be inherently gender-biased, and rebelled against pink or any other color being seen as inherently slanted towards any gender. Punk rock used pink in posters, in open defiance of the cultural programming of it as a “feminine” color, in order to shock the squares.

It wasn’t until the early ’80s that the pink and blue as feminine and masculine began to upswing again, and the reason for it isn’t necessarily because of the swing towards conservatism during that time, it was due to, well, GREED. The rise of pre-natal imaging which allowed parents to see whether their child was biologically a boy or a girl opened the door to companies wanting to cash in on this with clothing items, furniture, nursery items and other costly accessories, which they figured they could make twice the money on if they divided them up into pink and blue for girls and boys.

Even so, the subculture continued to rebel against the delineation of color as a sexist trope, and in particular creative artists overtly subverted the conventions, most notably artists like Prince, who popularized the regal purple, and acts like Duran Duran and Culture Club, which wore bright pastels, regardless of any connotations as “feminine.”

With everyone from rock stars to rap stars to athletes following suit to subvert and rebel against conventions in ensuing decades, the use of pink has gotten to a point where it’s once more become a significant fashion statement of Gen Z, a sort of rebellious F-U to previous generations programmed to feel triggered or insecure by a simple color. Professional basketball and soccer players, rappers, and rock stars now routinely wear pink as a fashion statement, with everyone from Machine Gun Kelly to David Beckham’s Inter Miami soccer team to the Miami Heat to Barcelona to Juventus adopting pink jerseys as a statement of style and individualism.