THINK PINK (VIEWPOINT COLOUR)

Once feminised for children, it didn’t take long to reach adults and by the 1950s, pink was big business. In 1948, after female students started wearing pink men’s shirts, Brooks Brothers launched a women’s version – it was a hit and brought female spending power into sharp focus. Newly developed plastics meant almost anything could be made in pink. The 1956 Dodge La Femme automobile was pink inside and out, and came with a pink cape, boots and handbag. Donald Featherstone’s injection-moulded flamingos of 1957 enabled the aspiring middle classes to personalise their near-identical pre-fabricated homes. But it was Mamie Eisenhower, first lady to President Dwight ‘Ike’ D Eisenhower, who really propagated pink. She recreated a pink bathroom in every military married quarters the couple lived in before her husband’s presidency. When she wore a gown studded with 2,000 pink rhinestones to his 1953 inauguration, America went mad for the colour. The White House might have been nicknamed ‘the Pink Palace,’ but of 20 million American homes built between 1945 and 1966, a quarter had at least one pink toilet. Mamie (quoted as saying, “Ike runs the country, I turn the pork chops”) was the perfect role model for women returning to homemaker roles after the Second World War.

For some women, pink disarmed the men they were challenging – after all it was in a pink Austin Healey Sprite, pink overalls and a pink crash helmet that racing driver Donna Mae Mims won 1964’s Sports Car Club of America National Championships. However, for many, their pink palaces started to feel like prisons. When Lynn Peril named her book Pink Think (presumably after the line “Now, I wouldn’t presume to tell a woman // what a woman oughtta think, // But tell her // if she’s gotta think: think pink” in the 1957 film Funny Face), she identified a code of conduct: “Pink Think assumes that there is a standard of behaviour to which all women … must adhere,” she says, dating the start of this ‘groupthink’ to the 1940s. As men returned from war and wanted their jobs back, educated women were sold the idea that the role of wife and mother was equal to a salaried job, just different. College attendance for women dropped, the average age of marriage fell, and by the end of the 1950s, American birth rates exceeded India’s. “They learnt that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights – the independence and the opportunities old-fashioned feminists fought for,” writes Betty Friedman in Feminine Mystique.

1950s icon Jane Mansfield might have claimed that “pink was my colour because it made me happy,” but even women who seemed to have it all sensed something was missing. “Each suburban woman struggled with it alone”, says Friedman. “As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slip-cover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid even to ask of herself the silent question: ‘Is this all?’”

It’s no wonder that the next generation shunned and subverted pink. In the ‘unisex era’ of 1965-1985, second-wave feminists became parents as child development theorists recommended bright colours over pastels. Pink was out. By the mid-1970s Sears carried no pink toddlers’ clothes whatsoever. Meanwhile Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren rebranded their shop with a four-foot-high pink rubber sign reading “SEX” and Zandra Rhodes dyed her hair hot pink. More poignantly, the American gay community appropriated the downward-facing pink triangles homosexual prisoners were forced to wear in Nazi concentration camps – firstly as a symbol of defiance against rising homophobia in Germany and then, turned upwards, as a precursor to red HIV and AIDS ribbons. In February 1974, The Body Politic ran a pink triangle on its cover, and Americans and Canadians began wearing them in solidarity. Recent feminist activism – from the pink pussy-hat marches after Donald Trump’s inauguration to the For All Womenkind’s logo (raised fists on a pink background) – has followed suit in reclaiming pink.

And now, of course, there is ‘millennial pink.’ Sources disagree on the exact shade – bubble-gum pink, rose gold and dusty pink are all contenders. The moment that it all started is contested too – was it Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel of 2014, Pantone’s selection of rose quartz as Colour of The Year and the rose gold iPhone 6s in 2016, or 2017’s overwhelmingly pink Milan Design Week? Even its name is unclear – Tumblr pink and Scandi pink are alternatives. Whatever the details, a whole generation has claimed – or been branded with – a colour, and that has to mean something.