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From Barbie’s lipstick shade to thousands of chick-lit covers, from gooey Mother’s Day cards to the wasteland of toys for girls, the colour pink has traditionally indicated a certain stratum of feminine experience. “I always say that when a child gets a hug from its mother, if that hug were a colour, it would be pink,” says Karen Haller, an expert in colour and branding. “That’s because it represents love, caring, nurturing and gentleness.”
In recent years, of course, we have seen a backlash against the colour. Politicians and parents have debated the effect on young girls of playing with pink-hued toys, with research connecting them to career choices and body dysmorphia. Everyday Sexism founder Laura Bates has described how this “pinkification” helps spread the message that “women cook, men work”. This month, discussions have centred on Stella, the female (and pink) addition to the Angry Birds set, its stereotypical colour scheme striking some as an attempt to create a female gaming “ghetto”. The associations we have with the colour are increasingly negative. “Something has gone really haywire,” admits Haller. “We’ve stopped resonating with the idea of pink as gentle, kind and caring.”
But if pink no longer means warm and fuzzy, what does it mean? “Weakness and a lack of intellectual rigour,” says style and colour consultant Angela Weyers. “For this reason it is not advisable for women to wear it to work in the corporate world or the City, as they are less likely to be taken seriously.”
If pink has an image problem, it is also subtly being reappropriated, with writers and artists rediscovering a subversive identity forged in queer politics. In her collection of essays Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay writes about the apparent contradictions of labelling herself with the “f” word. “I am a bad feminist because I am … a woman who loves pink.” In the final chapter, Bad Feminist: Take Two, where the writer reconciles her apparently non-feminist ways with her authentic self, Gay writes: “I used to say my favourite colour was black to be cool, but it is pink – all shades of pink. If I have an accessory it is probably pink.”
She underlines the point with a magenta-shaded font on the cover of the book. It’s a few shades lighter than the pumps worn by Texas senator Wendy Davis when she used a filibuster against a bill restricting access to abortion, and similar to the font on Beyoncé’s self-titled album from last year, the record that announced her as a feminist via a sample from Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the song Flawless.
For Beyoncé collaborator Nicki Minaj, hot pink is a visual trademark. Her array of outlandish pink hairpieces is as rebellious a statement as Zandra Rhodes’s pink hair was in the 60s: in her video for Anaconda, she wears a pink-fringed wig to pose provocatively with a banana before comically chucking it out of shot. But the colour is not just an aesthetic identity. Minaj told the Fader magazine that her new album, The Pinkprint, was going to be “the blueprint for female rappers to come”, simultaenously subverting and placing herself in the lineage of Jay-Z’s classic 2001 LP The Blueprint, and extending her run of pink-themed releases (2010’s Pink Friday was followed by 2012’s Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded).
Artist Arvida Byström, meanwhile, uses hot pink as a backdrop to pieces that double as modernist, online commentary. “I grew up with pink around me,” she says, via email. “I completely adored the colour as a child. It’s a colour that almost everyone has a love or hate relationship with. For me, it’s very tied to girliness. It’s constructed to have to do with young girls, [so it’s also] very political,” she says.
Byström uses the colour in a feminist context (“but that doesn’t mean all feminists have to love pink”), documenting her cyberlife through coded selfies, Lisa Frank-influenced nudes and disturbing bubblegum gifs. Byström argues that this isn’t about using the colour subversively. “There are loads of sides to pink and I work with symbols of femininity, and try and put them in positive contexts,” she says. And there’s no context more positive than the guerrilla art project Beware of Colour, which has been using swooshes of pink paint on dilapidated buildings to highlight the housing crisis in Johannesburg.
Closer to home, British artists Liv Thurley and Aryana Hessami curated PINKD, a limited-edition art book that featured 30 artists exploring “pink art in today’s society”. The reappropriation of pink can occassionally take a disturbing turn, as shown through the work of Belgian photographer An-Sofie Kesteleyn and her series My Little Rifle, which featured girls as young as six, predominately from the southern states of the US, proudly holding their bright-pink guns.
The irony in all this is that historically pink never stood for fluffy sentimentality. At the beginning of the last century, it was considered the appropriate colour for boys, while blue was for girls. “Pink was seen as being ‘light red’,” Haller says, “and red was the colour of masculinity – it represented stamina and power.” By the 1940s, marketeers had switched it around. And now, Haller says, pink, especially hot pink, is evolving into something else. “That colour is the adult version of soft pink, which is associated with little girls and submission,” she says. “Hot pink is feisty and grown up. In that tonal choice people are saying: ‘We’re not going to be seen as weak,’ and ‘Don’t mess with me.’”
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