A Millennial’s Pink – Looking back on the colour-of-the-year and its promotion of gender neutrality As 2017 draws to a close, Fashion Editor Caroline O'Connor looks back on millennial pink and its promotion of gender neutrality in fashion.

 

When Christian Dior stated, “tones of grey, pale turquoise and pink will prevail” it was certainly a premonition for 2017. Throughout the year it-colour of the moment, millennial pink, has been seizing the fashion world, bringing with it fresh waves of both controversy and praise. The colour has become ubiquitous, from the got-it-all Instagrams of fashion bloggers and celebrities to the catwalk shows of some of the industry’s leading designers. Although there has been some debate over the exact shade, it is widely agreed upon that it is a sort of dusty nude concoction creating a barely-there pastel, a just-about-pink pink. Yet, despite this contest it’s not the particular hue, but what it stands for that has been causing the most commotion.

The official name was coined last year as Véronique Hyland of Elle Magazine mused upon why millennial women have become so captivated. “Remember when pink was déclassé? … This summer, we’re conspicuously reading Sweetbitter, drinking a matching glass of frosé, and Instagramming it all with our rose-gold iPhones”. However, it is not exclusively millennial women who are enamoured. Technically the shade is pink with the blue taken out, and while its chemistry may be disposing of all things stereotypically masculine, men across the globe are embracing the shade. Nothing brings gender into the fashion conversation quite like the colour pink, and 2017 has seen a revolution as the girly saccharine tones of the last century are being replaced by something fresh and androgynous. This new pink aims to be more than straightforwardly pretty and looks to challenge gender roles propped up by ingrained wardrobe conventions. Millennial pink is now being heralded as the pioneering shade of unisex pink, calling on the fashion world to embrace a more gender-neutral approach.

Gender neutrality is about challenging the meaning of gender and our presumptions surrounding its clockwork conformities. Pink for a girl and blue for a boy has always seemed the status quo, but on what basis do we make this premise? In a 2007 study performed at Newcastle University, researchers speculated that women may gravitate more towards pink on an evolutionary basis. They suggested that as historically women were gatherers as opposed to hunters, their senses developed to detect ripe red berries. However, research critic Dr Ben Goldacre and fellow scientists found fault with the plausibility of this logic, claiming it only really proved how deep our pink-based bias runs. A person’s reading of colours is largely more likely to rely on their own cultural upbringing, as supported in a later study in 2013.  Conducted on the Himba people of Namibia, where pink isn’t an associated female colour, women were shown not to have any preference towards pink or red tones. Similar cultural conflicts of colour association have developed on a wide range. While in Western society white is conventionally worn by brides, in Indian Hinduism it’s the colour worn by widows.

In fact, the well-rehearsed routine of pink and blue in Western culture is a relatively new invention. In the United States and Europe, these colours only began to be utilised as gender signifiers just prior to World War One and even then, took time to become commonplace. By 1918 the Ladies’ Home Journal remained confident in writing “the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl”. The reason being that pink was seen as a stronger, confident colour, while blue was delicate and dainty. Their view is backed up by Art History as women were often depicted in blue, being the colour traditionally connected to the iconography of the Virgin Mary. From the voluminous blue robe detailed with gold of Giotto’s ‘Ognisanti Madonna’ painted in 1310 to Degas’ ballerinas in ‘Dancers in Blue’ of 1895, blue was the colour of women.

(Gucci Spring Summer 2017) 

Despite its symbolic evolution, the sight of a woman wearing blue remains nothing out of the norm. However, since the 1940s when pink was decisively recognised as the signifier of the female gender, the reversal of men wearing pink has become seeped in social stigmatism. In a long-established society where men have been shamed for expressing stereotypically feminine qualities, the intense bias attached to pink has dissuaded many from incorporating it into their wardrobe. 2017’s blossoming popularity of millennial pink amongst men is a true testament to the changing attitudes of modern Western society, elevating pink to a place confidence in the male fashion arena. A new culturally-aware generation is emerging and aiming to reclaim pink. As the movement has gained momentum new enterprises such as ‘Pinkstinks’ have formed. The campaign takes an oppositional stance to the classification of pink, and highlights the damage caused by marketing which heavily stereotypes young girls, describing how they believe “all children – girls and boy – are affected by the ‘pinkification’ of girlhood”.

Millennial Pink planted its roots back in 2013 as it-girl Cara Delevinge starred in a pink-themed photoshoot for British Vogue alongside two pastel-dyed puppies. It was spotted again the following year in the painted pink ground floor of the hit film Grand Budapest Hotel. Pantone announced rose quartz as their 2015 colour-of-the-year, but its floral tones remained a little too cutesy to really take root. Fast-forward to 2017 and the company selects ‘Pale Dogwood’ for their Spring fashion report, describing how “this more unilateral approach to colour is coinciding with societal movements toward gender equality and fluidity.” In accordance to this, millennial pink soared on the spring-summer 2017 runway shows, appearing everywhere from Balenciaga to Celine. Japanese-born Chitose Abe of Sacai included three pink looks in her unisex menswear show. The juxtaposition of a conventionally masculine silhouette with a feminine cliché in the form of an all-pink tailored suit, with oversized white fishnet acting as the underlying shirt, leaves us contemplating whether the gender of the model really held any meaning to the design aesthetic. As the fashion world wakes up to gender neutrality, three of the industry’s biggest names, Raf Simons of Calvin Klein, Alessandro Michele of Gucci and Christopher Bailey of Burberry are leading the way, having each recently combined their womenswear and menswear collections into a single unanimous catwalk show. Gucci’s 75-look extravaganza at Milan fashion week was set in an all-pink, glitzed out venue where the first female model stepped out in millennial pink trousers, matched with a windowpane check pink-and-grey suit jacket.  The outfit was completed by a hot pink turban, the traditionally masculine headwear further challenging our relationship between fashion and the sexes.

(Sacai Spring Summer 2017) 

Meanwhile, the high-street is proving that gender neutrality isn’t just a runway fantasy, as Zara released their ungendered collection in 2016. Following suit, John Lewis became the first major fashion retailer to scrap allocated girls and boys signs in their childrenswear department and opting for gender-neutral labelling on their own-brand clothing up to the age of fourteen. In the line-up given by Dior, he wouldn’t have expected millennial pink to be the grey. The perfect neutral between its two vying counterparts, the colour is now as likely to be seen in a menswear collection as a little girl’s dress-up box. Once fixated gender hang-ups have proven possible to be uprooted, we are reigning in a new fashion generation draped in millennial pink.

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