We are made to think that pink is for girls and blue for boys.
Even though, there are no set parametres around girls on how much blue they should wear, but there is certainly a taboo around men wearing pink. Some shades of pink are seriously forbidden for men. A man in magenta pink trousers can be called all kinds of names in our society, because we restrict the colour only to girls and women.
“In the 18th Century, it was perfectly masculine for a man to wear a pink silk suit with floral embroidery,” says historian and curator Valerie Steele.
‘The Great Gatsby’ movie is a favourite for most fashion lovers, for the variety of glamorous costumes worn by the actors. Each costume depicts the era the book was written in. There is one particular scene in the movie, where Jay shows up to lunch with his mistress and her husband in a pink suit. For modern readers, it’s tempting to take his colour selection as a sign of dandyism. When cuckolded husband Tom Buchanan criticises Gatsby for wearing pink, he seemingly echoes the present-day assumption that pink is a feminine colour.
Why would a man choose to wear the colour pink?
But that would be imposing today’s view of pink on the past. Buchanan uses the suit’s hue not to discredit Gatsby’s masculinity or virility, but his intellectual bona fides.
He mentions it only when Gatsby’s described as an Oxford man, “Buchanan was incredulous. ‘Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit’.”
Buchanan’s comments make it clear that men in pink meant something different in the 1920s than today. Only in the relatively recent past did pink acquire its feminine connotations.
“It’s got a bit of an attitude to it,” Chanel Makeup & Colour Global Creative Director Pica. “It’s like a little rebellion,” she continues, referring specifically to the pink shade “Infrarose” she used at the late Karl Lagerfeld’s spring show.
No matter what the society thinks of it, pink indeed is a universal colour that can be shamelessly embraced by any gender-no rules around pink please!
The writer can be reached at [email protected]
Published in Daily Times, March 21st 2019.