Pink is the new Blue

Walking into any menswear section of shops, one will find shades of pink in striped shirts. Similarly, women too storm the workforce in grey and blue color outfits to fulfil their career aspirations. This revolution makes everyone claim “pink is the new blue!”

Pink is the new blue can be portrayed in two ways, of which one is to show women’s dominance in today’s world compared to the past when they didn’t have the will of their own. The other being the stereotypic definition of gender, based on colors pink and blue.

When people find a woman working at a construction site or driving a taxi that too at late-night shifts, one might comment “Pink is the new blue”. But if they discover a man performing household chores or looking after his children, would we ever spot them exclaiming “Blue is the new pink”? It’s highly uncertain!

The point is the elimination of the belief that men are supposed to mend cars, and women are supposed to do household chores and look after their children. Even colors cannot express someone’s character, based on who they are and what are their emotions. A person is much more than a gender. A person is an individual with his or her balance of characteristics. These characteristics cannot chain them to any gender stereotype and one should always act as he or she always pursued to be.

Talking about colors, being a kid, I always, at the back of my mind, had a question, “Who has defined that the blue color is associated with boys or masculinity and pink is with girls or femininity and why only pink and blue and not green for girls and red for boys? What is it about only these two colors?

When I profound into it, I discovered that before outfitting babies into gender-specific pastels, they did not wear colors at all. In fact, most babies wore unisex white gowns or gowns that were simply the color of the fabric that they were made from. This was because plain colors were thought of as children’s clothing more broadly and there was nothing like distant outfits based on whether there was a boy or a girl. Pastels did not even play a part, not before World War 1, after which colors started getting aligned to gender. When colors started getting aligned it wasn’t that boys are equal to blue and girls are equal to pink in fact it was the other way round.

 According to an article in June 1918, Earnshaw’s Infants Department publication stated:” The reason is that pink being the more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and daintier, is prettier for the girl.”

In fact, pink was viewed as a boyish version of the masculine color red. Pink and blue had a lot to do with manufacturers around the 1940s who started making clothing which color coordinated young boys and girls dividing it between pink and blue based on what the public liked and bought. Finally, the color codes we know of have won out today. The idea that the person should be able to distinguish a baby’s gender as soon as they look at them stood at the heart of many people who eventually started dressing children in an article of noticeable clothing that would distinguish them from each other. This helped style guides and companies to capitalize more.

Nowadays, boys or men aren’t shy to say that they like the color pink rather they are courageous enough to wear it in public to portray the fact that color should not relate to gender. To them, it is just another color that they are proud to wear. This also symbolizes that men now want to reveal a more subtle and less violent nature to others.

- Nimisha Soni