Rosa and celeste: why these colors identified girls and boys for decades – 06/04/2019

In 2005, Korean artist JeongMee Yoon noticed that her five-year-old daughter I just wanted to wear clothes and pink toys. It was the beginning of Pink and blue projectsA photographic survey of the cultural preferences of children and parents from different environments and countries. The models were repeated again and again: pink for girls, light blue for children. In quilts, hygiene products, dolls, furniture, tools, decorations and even cutlery.

The American historian Jo Paoletti has devoted his career to the study of the construction of gender stereotypes by the fashion. Your book Pink and blue: Separating children from girls in America explore how the current identification of these two colors was made with the "masculine" and the "feminine". In dialogue with Clarin, reveals a fact ignored by many: this tradition that seems immutable it has been consolidated over the course of a generationit was not so long ago.

Until the end of the 19th century, boys and girls wore white dresses (sometimes skirts) homemade confectionery, which had the advantage of not discolouring with strong soaps or boiling, a common method of washing at that time. In addition, they facilitated diaper change and could be recycled if a new son or daughter was born. Just watch a little Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States between 1933 and 1945, to prove it.

"The chronology is not linear: between 1900 and 1920, the clothes of men have undergone modifications, to" teach them "to little men", explains the researcher, referring in particular to the introduction of pants and short hair (up to 5 or 7 years) in young children.

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The chromatic badignment, on the other hand, was still open: around 1918, as the magazines of the time show, it was fashionable to wear pink for men, to be a tone derived from the red, so-called "strong" … and the heavenly, more "delicate", for girls.

In the years that surrounded the First World War, some badociated the first color with fire and blood; and the second to harmony, peace and water. For others, the choice of a particular garment depends on the factions infant: if he had clear eyes, he was used heavenly; he had dark, pink eyes. This, in turn, has varied according to each store.

According to Paoletti, colors – like fabrics and prints – they mutated gradually. From the 40s The trend we are experiencing today, from the hands of baby boom (significant increase in birth rate in the post-war period), economic growth, consumption expansion, marketing and mbad-produced clothing.

In any case, as seen in the movies of the time, the last word has not yet been said. At the premiere of Peter Pan (1953) the childish character Michael Darling dressed in a pink pajamas. The same was colored in blue for the relaunch of 2013. The same luck ran Junior, of The lady and the vagabond (1955): in the original version, it looked like that of the youngest Darling, but in the sequel The adventures of Scamp (2001), he wore a light blue.

The author says that certain groups feminists at the end of 60 and the 70 promoted, among other things, the "Unibad breeding", which affected social practices. In 1972, artists such as Roberta Flack and Diana Ross participated in the famous work Free to be you, who questioned traditional gender roles. In the shops he appeared clothing for boys and girls who tend to eliminate dichotomies.

It would only be in the 1980s, just four decades ago, when the bifurcation of styles was definitely installed. In baby clothes, the pink became ornate, next to ruffles and new cuts.

What were the reasons? "I think both homophobia as misogyny They had an influence on the refusal to give children anything badociated with girls, "says the historian. during pregnancy, they would have given an unexpected impulse to the question. Knowing the bad of the fetus before birth, the preparation and sale of differentiated objects has grown.

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Paoletti, one of the most competent of the subject, still can not elucidate why these two colors were chosen "Blue has been badociated with the Virgin Mary in many Catholic areas of Europe and pink salmon is a complement to color theory, but I have not found a clear reason, especially because all it's gone so gradually and so differently, "he says. .

At the moment, pink and blue are still an industry in themselves, but in different parts of the world there are more and more questions about binariness and traditional mandates. What original palette will generations manage in a hundred years?

AS