Singer and actor Jayne Mansfield, who lived in her own “Pink Palace”, said: “men want a girl to be pink, helpless, and do a lot of deep breathing.” Pink had come to signify something delicate and submissive – but some had other ideas. “Pink is the only true rock ‘n’ roll colour,” said Paul Simonon of The Clash, and the hue became a favourite of punk bands like The Ramones and The Sex Pistols, with Vivienne Westwood’s Sex Shop sporting a bright pink neon sign.
Around this time, pink also emerged as a symbol of celebration, self-identification and pride in the LGBTQ+ community – who in the 1970s reclaimed the colour from its dark past in Nazi Germany, when pink triangles were used to identify gay prisoners in concentration camps. In the 1980s, the pink triangle became a sign of resistance, featuring on posters during the Aids crisis, and remains a powerful symbol in the queer community.
In the 21st Century, pink became an increasingly controversial colour, rejected by some and reclaimed by others. Advertisers who marketed female products using pink – from Lego sets to pink footballs – faced a backlash. The “pink tax” became a damning term to describe the idea that women paid more than men for identical products, such as toiletries. Campaigners called for the end of gendered pink and blue toys, with reports warning lazy stereotyping they could affect a child future prospects.
If all this showed how powerful pink could be, some harnessed that power to their advantage. Politicians like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi embraced pink suits – a way to subtly wield authority while also reassuring that they weren’t a threat. This idea was explored in popular culture, too. In Legally Blonde, the pink-obsessed Elle Woods (played by Reese Witherspoon) is dismissed as a dumb blonde – but lands a place at Harvard Law School (“What, like it’s hard?”) and graduates top of her class.
The past decade has been another complicated one for the colour. Millennials even had their own shade of pink – but this watered-down hue was an almost apologetic version. “The kind of pinks that have done really well in the past few years and transcended girliness have been yellow and grey based pinks, instead of the blue based pinks, like Barbie pink and Legally Blonde pink,” says St Clair.
Some feminists have celebrated pink as a symbol of female power. At 2017 Women’s March thousands of women wore handcrafted “pink pussy hats” – though others argued it trivialised the serious issues they were protesting against.
So, as Barbie makes the colour inescapable once again, what does it represent now? Director Greta Gerwig said she wanted to make “something anarchic and wild and completely bananas”, and says “it most certainly is a feminist film… in a way that includes everyone.” (Although Mattel themselves beg to differ). Actor America Ferrera was drawn to the film because it confronts Barbie’s role in “shaping expectations for women” and her character Gloria – assistant to Mattel’s CEO and mother of a teenage daughter – delivers a pivotal monologue that Margot Robbie says “captures the cognitive dissonance of being a woman under the patriarchy”.
This inclusive and feminist take on Barbie – which also fully celebrates pink – looks set to be one of the biggest films of the summer, if not the year – and has the potential to be the most successful film ever by a female director. There’s nothing delicate, dainty or frivolous about that. Pink has rarely felt more powerful.
In the film, too, pink is for everyone – including Ken. And although one movie – or one world-famous footballer wearing pink – is unlikely to singlehandedly change our perception of pink as a gendered colour, our fraught relationship with it might be shifting. “Shorthands and clichés are very powerful and it’s difficult to escape them,” says St Clair. “I think what is changing is there’s a loosening of the idea that pink is a limiting colour and that pink means something lesser than blue. There’s a power and a knowingness with the way that pink is used now. It’s coming with a wink.”
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