Name: How did pink become a girly color?
Uploaded: 2022-05-03T21:01:20.000Z
Duration: 3 min 44 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In 1927, "TIME Magazine" took a survey of all the major department stores across the country.

To-infinitive

They wanted to know which colors they associated with girls in their clothing lines.

Past simple

There's also a catalog in 1918 that suggests that little girls should all wear blue because it's a delicate and dainty color.

That's Jennifer Wright; she's an author and often writes about history and fashion for "Racked".

It was only after the war that pink got the symbolic association that we have today.

In 1953, Dwight Eisenhower, the general who won World War II, becomes president.

And this actually turns out to be a pretty important moment in the history of pink.

It was Ike's inauguration and Mamie Eisenhower came out in this enormous rhinestone-studded pink ballgown,

the likes of which you never would've seen during the war when women were wearing much simpler styles.

Mamie Eisenhower loved the color pink, and she was known for it.

She thought that the pink really brought out her complexion; she had really pretty blue eyes, it was a nice contrast.

In fact, a quick search of newspaper headlines mentioning Mamie Eisenhower also reference the color pink pretty frequently.

And it wasn't just called pink, it was called  "Mamie pink".

And she went around giving quotes like, "Ike runs the country, I turn the pork chops."

But, yeah, it was a very arbitrary decision that she just loved pink, and everybody else decided, okay, this is the color that ladylike women wear.

There's a great song in Funny Face called "Think Pink".

Here is our theme, here is our answer: pink!

Where the lady editor of a magazine, who is very much based off of Diana Vreeland, sings about how women in America today have got to think pink.

And there's a great line in it where she says, "banish the black, burn the blue," which are two colors that women would've been seeing a lot of during the war years.

Around this time, pink became a popular color, not only in just women's clothing but also in the home.

Pink as a bridal blush, new Camay; loving pink Camay with an exciting new fragrance; sealed in pink pearl foil, new loving pink Camay.

By the way, it wasn't seen as a terribly oppressive thing.

But, there were definitely women, like Diana Vreeland, who didn't really want to revert to those traditional roles.

I haven't seen a woman in two weeks in anything but pink⏤what about you?

It was at this point where you start to see the color pink representing women⏤real and fictional⏤who were anything but traditional.

The champion racecar driver Donna Mae Mims is a really good example of this.

She had a pink uniform and a pink helmet and a pink racecar.

There's the Pink Ladies in "Grease" and the Plastics in "Mean Girls".

The girls who are incredibly canny and kind of terrifying, brightly explain...

There's a great cover of Hillary Clinton on the cover of "People" magazine wearing a bright-pink jacket, and the caption next to it is how "we need to break the highest, hardest glass ceiling" as women.

So, she's pretty much doing the opposite of what Mamie Eisenhower wanted to do.

This isn't just about the color pink; it's about how it's used to define a person's personality and what we think they're capable of.

She still wants to show people that, really, I'm just... just a girl, just like you.