Pink Was a Man's Color First
Pink Was a Man's Color First
For two hundred years pink meant money and power, and men wore it without thinking twice.
Ask most people why pink is a girl's color and you get a shrug. The honest answer is that it is not, and it was not, for almost the entire time we have had the color.
Color Belonged to the Rich
Before the 1850s, dye was expensive. Making a color took plants, minerals, labor, and time, and the result moved from batch to batch. Colored cloth announced money.
The Victoria and Albert Museum states it plainly. In the 1700s European men wore pink as a sign of wealth and power, not gender. Louis XV wore it. Boucher painted aristocrats in it. A man in a rose silk coat was reading as rich, not soft.
Pink Is Red
Pink is a pale red, and it carried what red carried. Vigor. Heat. Command. Nobody in 1750 thought a rose coat was delicate. They thought it was expensive.
Then Came 1918
The turn was fast and it came out of trade, not taste. In June 1918 a trade publication for children's clothing, Earnshaw's Infants' Department, printed the accepted rule of the day. Pink for the boys, blue for the girls. The reasoning was that pink was the stronger and more decided color, and blue the daintier one.
In 1927 Time published a chart of gender appropriate colors drawn from the leading American retailers. It still put boys in pink.
The modern rule is younger than the automobile. Stores settled it. Nothing older or deeper did.
Where It Stands Now
The Museum at FIT gave the color its own exhibition, Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color. Around eighty looks across several hundred years. A stiff eighteenth century dress at one end, a protest hat at the other.
A man who will not wear pink is obeying a marketing decision from 1918. That is all it is.
Our Rose
Vintage Rose is ours. The color was created here. It is not chosen off a mill's card and it exists nowhere else on earth.
The corduroy is woven for us in Japan, and then every pair goes through our own garment wash. The wash is where the depth comes from, and the fade, and the reason a pair looks like it belongs to whoever is wearing it.
It reads as rich. That is the oldest thing pink has ever done.
A Way Of Life.
Shop the Story
the Vintage Rose Thermal Henley
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