Part I
Underpinnings
Why We Wear What We Wear
Chapter One
Think Pink
IN THE SUMMER of 2016, I started to see a predominant shade bubbling up on everything that was marketed to me. Rather than being some dictated-from-on-high runway âcolor of the season,â this was something aimed at the masses, backgrounding subway ads and fronting book covers as well as the windows of high-end boutiques.
It was a variation on the pink shade Iâd always associated with girlhood, not necessarily my girlhood, but the concept at large. But instead of being the saccharine Barbie pink that brings to mind a disembodied squeal of âAccessories sold separately!â it was a weirdly desaturated hue that seemed stripped of all associations with bubblegum and Sweet Valley High book spines. I saw it on tubes of Glossier makeup, on the walls of the newly sprouted womenâs club The Wing, and on what felt like every Instagrammable book aimed at women in my cohortâlate twenties and early thirtiesâfrom Sweetbitter to #GIRLBOSS.
The color seemed to defy the generally accepted order of fashion, where a trend trickles down from high to low (think of the famous âcerulean speechâ from The Devil Wears Prada) or trickles up from low to high (think of high fashionâs recent embrace of everything from sweatsuits to Crocs). Instead, it came from seemingly nowhere, and quickly blanketed every tier of design. Everything from the high-end Swedish brand Acne Studios to subway ads for Thinx period underwear used some variation of this shade.
After my then-coworkers at The Cut, New York magazineâs womenâs vertical, started discussing the phenomenon, I wrote an essay for the site examining the idea, attempting to separate this strain of the color from the pure Elle Woods version. âThe titration of actual pinkness varies a little, but itâs still a fairly narrow spectrumâfrom salmon mousse to gravlax,â I wrote. âItâs a non-color that doesnât commit, whose semi-ugliness is proof of its sophistication.â I was just trying to tease out a cultural curiosity, but along the way, I ended up stumbling into coining the term âmillennial pink,â a phrase that has gone on to make untold millions for . . . people who are not me.
In the story, I traced the phenomenon to a generational mood of âambivalent girliness.â Women my age were starting to embrace the gendered tics weâd been told would hold us back in the workplace, like vocal fry or punctuating phrases with âlikeâ and âum.â Now we could take pleasure in makeupâprovided it was the kind that skimmed, rather than spackled, a canvas of perfect skin, and that came with collectible stickers. We could be bosses, though weâd probably use the awkward portmanteau âgirlboss,â so as not to threaten anyone. We could lead while wearing sweatshirts and sneakers and nail art in that hyper-identifiable shade of curdled pink.
The designer Rachel Antonoff has made a point of dressing cool, feminist women like Aubrey Plaza, Jenny Slate, and Alia Shawkat (often in pink), and has held fashion shows with sleepover and school-dance themes that explicitly reference girlhood. Antonoff told me she sees this new wave of pink as a way of âreclaiming something that . . . was maybe thought of before as too girly.â When she was younger, âit was imprinted on me that it was cool to be one of the guys and to not be girly . . . to not be too feminine. A phrase that I have been thinking a lot about lately, which is just rife in pop culture and films, is a man [saying] to a woman: âYouâre not like other girls.â And that drives me fucking insane. Let me tell you who Iâm exactly like: Every girl I ever thought was cool or smart or fun or funny. Why is that a compliment? Because thatâs not a compliment that women give to men.â She sees this wave of pink as a way to âreclaim these things that we thought made us less serious, less to-be-reckoned-with . . . and say âNo, we can be serious and like pink.â â
There are certainly things to embrace about this color, but a lot of its more questionable aspects got power-washed away by the frantic media coverage. Most people whoâve used the phrase âmillennial pinkâ did not learn about it from my essay, but even I was surprised at how divorced the term became from its origin. I saw little analysis of its negative connotations. It had been reduced purely to its consumerist id: âHere are more things to buy in this color you love!â
Only a few months after I wrote the story, the phrase, which Iâd initially used to define a much narrower color range, had entered the lexicon, like ânormcoreâ before it. It had come to encompass everything from straight-up pastel pink to Fran Drescher magenta. My lazy coinage had gone viral, and pinkâs hegemony was complete. My life quickly became a chromatically themed Groundhog Day. I got daily press releases pointing me to the best âmillennial pinkâ artwork, snacks, Airbnbs, and blushes. People at parties explained the definition to me, usually incorrectly. I went to a pink-branded Pilates studio that, like so many things in this hue, seemed to exist mostly for Instagram; its wan rosy lights, embedded in small, shrine-like structures in its walls, lit us as we studiously planked. I went to an all-pink restaurant in Nolita where the food was, mercifully, not pink. (At least, I remember thinking, my insides could be shielded from this scourge.) Even when I went to Disneyland, not my idea of a hotbed of bleeding-edge cool, they were selling millennial pink Mickey ears, which might have been the breaking point for me. Everywhere I turned, I was swaddled in pink, as sticky with it as though Iâd stepped in bubblegum, longing for the embrace of a cool blue or green.
It had started to feel as though the color itself was a shorthand directed at an entire generational cohort, shrieking âBuy me!â And as with any trend, there were hangers-on, too: attempts to make millennial teal, purple, and even something called âGen Z yellowâ happen. As far as I can tell, they didnât. Weâve cycled through the many spokes of the color wheel, but pink has hung on, trapping us all in sickeningly sweet stasis. Like people on an endless layover, weâre stuck here for a while.
Who is âweâ? Well, there have been other color trends that swept an entire generation: the baby blue of Hard Candyâs Sky nail polish that dominated the mid-â90s, the aerobics-evoking neons of the â80s. But Iâve rarely encountered a visual phenomenon that felt so generically aimed at an entire demographic. Like pinstripes to a yuppie or a Lacoste croc to a prepster, the shade came to stand for an entire generationâs and genderâs worldviewâthe Lena Dunham of colors.
The color pink didnât always telegraph âgirl.â It was only in the 1940s that parents began to differentiate boysâ and girlsâ clothes by color, and not till the â80s and â90s, when millennials were growing up, that various shades of pink ran riot on every holiday seasonâs It toy aimed at girls (see: Pretty Pretty Princess, Little Miss Makeup, Dream Phone, Mall Madness. For Barbie, a special Pantone shade, #219C, was copyrighted). But by the time I was a young adult, pink had full-fledged connotations of not just female, but young. Vapid. Incompetent. Clueless (in the Horowitzian sense). It was not a color youâd wear to be taken seriously at your job. Elle Woods wore it. So did the Plastics (on Wednesdays, at least). So when it came creeping back into our consciousness, pink had an almost return-of-the-repressed quality, oozing through the brick wall of social conditioning, defying the demand that it be put away like so many other childish things.
Its semi-familiarity was part of its appeal. Think about the trappings of millennial pink cultureâthe stickers, the crop tops, the high-end jelly shoes, the many gingham things. What are they but our childhood favorites, repackaged into something palatable to our adult selves?
Revisiting my original story, the whole phenomenon feels more insidious than I once thought, especially as I consider how the past few years have unfolded. When I first wrote about millennial pink, I thought it represented a kind of half step on the part of women toward embracing, not apologizing for, our genderâan improvement on cloaking ourselves in shoulder-padded blazers and trying to be permanently in corporate costume, the way our mothersâ generation did in the â80s. It was a rebuff to the Lean In school of feminism, which encouraged us to subsume those feminine-coded traits in service of climbing the ladder. Now, Iâm not so sure.
The color came to stand in for a softer, non-confrontational strain of feminism, wherein women proclaimed their inclusivity while joining exclusive clubs and buying expensive signifiers of sisterhood, like a $650 sweater with a patch that reads RADICAL FEMINIST. How different, really, were these items from the dolls and tutus and teacups we were sold as children? And if we were so committed to wholeheartedly loving pink, why did we still swerve away from the saccharine side of it?
I think the association with childhood is crucial here. For many women in their twenties and thirties, adult life has not delivered on CEO Barbieâs promises. Those of us who graduated from college are mostly saddled with student loans, underpaying gig-economy jobs supplemented by side hustles, and limited prospects for the future. (And thatâs if weâre lucky!) Add to that the challenges of succeeding as a woman in the workplace, from the pernicious (sexual harassment, the gender pay gap) to the everyday irritants (men taking credit for our ideas). Meanwhile, weâre being told we can achieve anything, and that if we havenât achieved all we wanted, itâs our fault for being weak or unmarketable or insufficiently self-promotional. Why donât we have more Instagram followers or a more finely honed personal brand? We are transitional figures, vessels stuffed with empty empowerment, launched into an environment that hasnât caught up to that idealized vision of gender equality.
With all this in mind, who wouldnât long for the prosperous years of our childhoods, and instinctively be drawn to anything reminding us of them? The colorâs popularity can be read as the incomplete embrace of full-on femininity. No, we shouldnât be ashamed of being girls. But we also shouldnât be ashamed of being women.
Fashion and consumption can bring legitimate joy, and I donât necessarily begrudge anyone their millennial pink bucket bags. Itâs fun to have what everyone else has, and even smart people secretly enjoy being marketed to. But I wonder if this period in fashion history, with its toothless pastels and sweet, ruffled, Regency-style minidresses, will come to be seen as analogous to the â80s fashion backlash against strong-shouldered power suits worn with sneakers.
If youâre young enough to be getting millennial pink nail art, you werenât sentient for this moment. But if youâre older, you may remember that fashion reached a crisis point in the early half of that decade. Women began buying less clothing, preferring to budget for practical line items like homes and cars. Into this void came designers like Christian Lacroix, who began offering enormous, restrictive gowns complete with bustles, with prices topping out in the mid-five figures. Susan Faludi, writing about Lacroixâs collections in Backlash, her seminal work about the one-step-forward-two-steps-back landscape of 1980s feminism, called the style High Femininity. Lacroix said he designed for women who want to âdress up like little girls.â Faludi, being a third-waver, preferred the phrase âpunitively restrictive clothing.â
As with today, the trend was accompanied by a political rollback of womenâs freedoms, bent on legally reducing them to impotent childhood. But the difference is that back then, the infantilization thing did not play. Yes, socialites swanned around in Lacroixâs designs, enjoying their Marie-Antoinette-at-the-hameau quality. But women, for the most part, did not want to dress up like Little Bo Peep, and the mass-market versions of Lacroixâs confections lingered on department store racks.
Now, weâve entered the stealth sequel to this period, what you might call High Femininity 2.0. But this time, the crucial difference is that women are buying in: to ruffles, to rompers, to all manner of smocked things straight out of an â80s Laura Ashley catalog. If thereâs a loose equivalent of Lacroix in these times, it would be the designer Batsheva Hay, who makes Laura Ingalls Wilderâesque dresses apparently designed for traversing the plains of Williamsburg and fording the Gowanus Canal. Like Lacroixâs Marie Antoinetteâevoking frippery, they look back to vague memories of a simpler, âless complicatedâ time. Thereâs no frontier left, but her designs are a form of frontier nostalgia; to some commentators, they have evoked homesteading or Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) garb.
These looks have a kind of hazy, appealing familiarity, too. They harken back to the vogue for lacy, frilly Gunne Sax and Jessica McClintock dresses that peaked in the late â80s and early â90s along with the craze for American Girl dollsâagain, the formative years of so many millennials. On Instagram, Alexa Chung called her high-necked, ruffled look âA throwback Friday, if you will (to the 1800s.)â Molly Fischer, writing in New York magazine, said that trendy prairie dresses âoffer conventional girliness drained of any prettiness, any elegance, any beauty: a gender norm codified as its homeliest possible husk.â Sounds like the sartorial version of millennial pink.
The prairie look has come back at a time when the ironic distance between dress-up and reality has narrowed. Abortion rights are being rolled back; the gender pay gap has barely budged. In a more progressive time, reverting to signifiers of old-fashioned repression might feel like an interesting choice; right now, itâs getting harder to separate the hipsters from the handmaids.
Weâre in a time where traditional femininity has been repackaged as cool, as chill, as âwoke.â The all-things-pink beauty brand Glossier commands us to be a body diversityâembracing âBody Heroâ as part of its lotion campaign; The Wing (with an influx of series B funding from corporate giant WeWork) was touted to be âreviving the radical womenâs club movement,â according to a Vice story. (What, exactly, is radical about an institution that costs more than $2,000 a year?) One of the most confounding things about the pink-tinted economy is the way itâs selling back existing things to us and making them ânew,â painting them as essentials of self-actualization and empowerment. An elite womenâs club isnât new. Nor is makeup. Nor is a modest floral garment. Nor is pink. What we have here is a rebranding of the reactionary.
This kind of virtue signaling, in tandem with a lack of real progress, is part and parcel of the pink-tinted economy. The railroad barons of the Gilded Age would never have said, âWeâre building cross-country rail lines to make connections and bring like-minded people together.â But now, especially in the world of tech, their contemporary heirs make these kinds of faux-philanthropic statements as a matter of course. And while these companies might align themselves with values you agree with, at the end of the day they still just want to sell you a ticket. The CEOs of supposedly female-friendly companies areâwhoops!âsometimes still guilty of denying employees maternity leave. Meet the new girlboss, same as the old boss.
The writer Ann Friedman has talked about the insidiousness of this idea, coining the phrase âmillennial pinkwashing,â which she defined on Twitter as âwhen you take an established feminist concept and drape it in pale-pink startup branding and sell it off to sponsors, ideally companies that are selling women fitness, beauty products, or corporate advancement.â Friedman and the writer Aminatou Sow had coined the term âshine theory,â which they define as âa commitment to collaborating with rather than competing against other peopleâespecially other womenâ back in 2013, and Friedman explains that she was frustrated that a phrase they came up with had been co-opted without credit by various corporate entities. (I can relate.)
I called Friedman to ask more about her thinking. âI started noticing more recently that [millennial pink] has become the signifying color of choice for what I would call âempowertisingâ organizations,â she said, noting that that term is itself a coinage by the writer Andi Zeisler. âItâs not like Iâm the first person to say, âLook at the ways capitalism is taking feminism and using it to sell stuff.â But the color is strongly associated with the kinds of companies, conferences, platforms that market themselves to creative-slash-entrepreneurial millennial women and promise information about getting ahead in your career . . . Ultimately theyâre selling brand integrations, brands that want to be in front of young women whose earning power is increasing. But itâs framed very much as, âWeâre doing this for feminism.â Itâs kind of the background color for quotes about getting whatâs yours.â
Friedman quickly clarifies that she doesnât have a problem with being a feminist who wants to learn how to advance her career. But âwhen you frame advancing your individual career as some sort of movement work, I get a little prickly about it,â she says. âThe kind of women who are likely to be in the demo for platforms like this are probably attracted to certain Instagram design tropes that you and I are both very familiar with, and this color is a big part of it.â She draws a comparison to the pink ribbonâbranded merchandise that is used to advertise breast cancer awareness, sometimes by companies who are contributing to that very disease with carcinogen-ridden products. Their philosophy seems to be, âHey, if we put this color on it, itâs good for womenâand donât ask any more questions.â
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