Room 38

38.1
The film star Audrey Hepburn once exclaimed: ‘I believe in pink’. Pink – especially bright pink – is a colour of extremes, evoking a wide range of associations: from girly to punk, from feminine to masculine, from innocent to erotic. 

The idea of pink as a colour for girls dates back only to the 1930s. In the eighteenth century, pink was still a neutral, unisex colour. At that time, wearing pink had nothing to do with gender, but was seen as a sign of elegance.

The Nazis used to identify gay men in the concentration camps with a pink triangle. The pink triangle was later adopted as the symbol of the gay liberation movement.

Today, pink is once again becoming  gender neutral. Since 2012 there has been talk of ‘Millennial Pink’, which is defined as androgynous.

38.2
‘Shocking pink’ was made famous in the late 1930s by the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who made it her signature colour.

In the original version of Schiaparelli’s biography Shocking Life (1954), she wrote that her – mostly white –

fashion clientele was initially resistant to ‘shocking pink’ because it was seen as a colour mostly worn by African Americans. This comment was censored in the American edition.

Was bright pink really widely worn by African Americans? The fashion designer Dapper Dan describes bright pink as a popular colour among black men in New York: ‘In the 1970s all the alpha guys in Harlem wanted a pink leather coat with a black Persian lamb collar. That coat was Gucci before Gucci. The closer you move to the millennial generation, the pinker it gets.’