If you didn’t believe in the power of pink before, you might after
seeing Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color, now on view at the
Fashion Institute of Technology. It’s a visual feast of 80 ensembles, from a
Louis XV-era gown to a pussy hat from the 2017 Women’s March. The exhibition
tells the compelling, polarizing history of the color pink in fashion and
demonstrates the power of our clothes to shape, and be shaped by, society. As exemplified
by one of the exhibition’s themes, “The Power of Pink,” the color tantalizes
with its wild incongruity: while it’s often considered cutesy and delicate,
pink can also be “fierce and feminist, punk and powerful.”
Divided into two galleries, the exhibition starts by addressing the
elephant in the room: why pink tends to be coded feminine. The answer is not as
cut and dry as you might expect: as color historian Michel Pastoureau once
wrote, “There is no transcultural truth to color perception. It is society that
‘makes’ color, defines it, gives it meaning”. Pink, it turns out, was not always a “girl color.” In one of the
exhibition’s remarkable displays are four historical costumes from the court of
Louis XV, including a woman’s robe and three men’s outfits. Representing the
theme of “Pompadour Pink,” after the pink-loving Madame de Pompadour, Louis
XV’s official chief mistress, they date to 18th-century France, when the color
was extremely fashionable among both men and women of the aristocracy. Thus the
story of pink in Europe begins as a genderless color, associated with ideas of
“elegance, novelty, and aristocratic splendor.” That started to change in the
late-19th century Industrial Era, when men shifted to primarily donning black
or other dark colors; women continued to wear the rainbow. The next two themes in the exhibition reinforce non-gendered, symbolic
values of pink. An anecdote presented in one of the labels in “Pink versus
Blue” describes how an American mother shopping for her son at Saks Fifth
Avenue in 1920 would certainly have encountered divided opinions on the color.
“Pink for the boy,” insists one sales clerk. “WHAT! Pink for a boy?” demands
another. In this section, a group of pink and blue children’s clothes
illustrate a great diversity of opinion in America during the 19th and early
20th centuries regarding which gender wears the pink color. This debate raged on until the Second World War, when pink was
aggressively marketed as female by advocates of returning women to the domestic
spheres. From then on, many shades of pink dominated women’s fashion, appearing
each time with an intention to define or redefine womanhood.
The linear organization proved especially challenging in the
introductory gallery, which surveys chronologically the history of feminizing
pink. However, truly distinctive pieces can emerge from the spatial monotony of
an assembly line. And to experience the changes in fashion in a linear
progression gave me an “ah-ha!” moment: from the height of pink’s feminization
in the 1950s, designers and influencers since then have been attempting to
return pink to its beginnings as a multivalent color. The idea is neither
revolutionary nor innovative, but feeling so proves just how entrenched our
gender-coding is. The question of why pink is so divisive followed me long after I left
behind the exhibition’s Pepto-Bismol-hued haute couture. The current trend to
return pink to its multifaceted, non-gendered origins gives me a glimmer of
hope that today’s society is not resistant to change, and that whatever
direction the shifting winds of fashion blow next, pink will remain a punk,
pretty, and powerful color.
A Brief History of the Color
Pink in Fashion, from the 1700s to Today. By Hannah Chan. Hyperallergic , October 1, 2018.
The shady past of the colour pink. By Kelly Grovier.
BBC , April 19, 2018
A key moment in pink’s emergence as an essential
element in the development of painting is the creation by the Early Renaissance
Italian painter Fra Angelico in the middle of the 15th Century of his famous
fresco in the Convent of San Marco in Florence, Italy, The Annunciation, which
depicts the moment in the New Testament that the Virgin Mary is informed by the
Archangel Gabriel that she will become the mother of Christ. Situated at the
top of a staircase solemnly ascended daily by pious monks, Fra Angelico’s
ground-breaking painting is one into which an observer’s spirit is summoned to
levitate. Crucial to sparking that mystical lift-off in the
fresco is the portrayal of the ethereal Archangel – who has himself mystically
crossed planes of being to swoop into Mary’s material sphere. Never mind the
polychromatic wings, what’s most surprising about Gabriel’s depiction is Fra
Angelico’s decision to clad him in plush pleats of sumptuous pink. We know from a contemporary artist’s handbook on how
to concoct pigments (Cennino Ceninni’s Il libro dell'arte, published a few
decades before Fra Angelico painted his fresco) that pink had been
traditionally reserved primarily for the rendering of flesh. “Made from the
loveliest and lightest sinopia that is found and is mixed and mulled with St.
John’s white”, Cennini explains, “this pigment does you great credit if you use
it for painting faces, hands and nudes on walls”. By draping Gabriel in the lushest of pinks, Fra
Angelico fleshes the Archangel out as a being of body and blood, breaking down
the distinction between holy spirit and ephemeral flesh. Pink is the pivot that
humanises heaven. No one would ever see the colour the same way again. In the
ensuing centuries, artists would invoke pink as shorthand for the blurring of
boundaries.
As the focus of Renaissance master Raphael’s Madonna
of the Pinks, a sprig of blushing carnations handed to the Virgin Mary by the
infant Christ, may seem unremarkable enough at first glance. In fact it amounts
to a kind of miraculous wrinkle in the fabric of time. According to religious
tradition, dianthus (the Greek name for the plant, meaning “flower of God”),
did not appear in the world until Mary wept at her son’s crucifixion. The
flower’s anachronistic appearance in Raphael’s scene, therefore, tinged with
the future blood of the baby who holds it, mysteriously establishes a pink kink
in the linear unfolding of the universe. Over time, pink would eventually blossom beyond the
petals of its complex theologies to inflect a wider array of secular
personality, all the while retaining its elusive allure and capacity to tease.
By the 18th Century, pink was offering itself as the colour of choice for
portraying high-profile mistresses, daring observers to deny its very
legitimacy as a respectable hue. No painting embodies pink’s gradual pendulum movement from the spiritual to
the secular more vividly than the French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s
exuberant The Swing, painted around 1767, between La Tour’s and Romney’s works.
Here, a fabulous flounce of flowing rose is frozen in mid swivel as the
swinging girl, pillowed in pinkness, flicks loose a silk shoe, attracting the
titillated attention of any number of camouflaged male gazes hiding in the
bushes around her. We’re a long way from the pink whisper of angels now.
In more recent times, pink continues to be seized upon by artists keen to
confound our expectations of what notes or message the floral pigment can
confidently carry. Having established a formidable reputation in the middle of
the 20th Century as a first-generation Abstract Expressionist, eschewing
figurative subjects entirely in the 1950s, Canadian-born American artist Philip
Guston reached for pink in a dramatic turn back to representational art in the
late 1960s. By then, the colour itself had undergone something of a commercial
transformation in American retail culture, having begun the century as a shade
more often associated with boys and masculinity than fairy princesses and
little girls’ dolls. But by the time Guston began introducing a menacing cast
of Ku Klux Klan-inspired cartoon goons, whose implausibly pale pink stubby
hoods continue to menace popular imagination to this day, the colour had been
re-commodified as delicate and feminine. Grabbing pink by the scruff for his
unsettling scenes of a seedy Americana, Guston slaps Barbie across the chops. At the same moment that Guston’s provocative pink was poking the art world
in the eye, scientific studies were underway by Alexander Schauss, Director of
the American Institute for Biosocial Research, to determine whether
manipulations of the colour could help control the behaviour of subjects
surrounded by it. The result of Schauss’s investigation was the concoction of
the psychologically subtle shade now known as “Baker-Miller Pink”, after the
Naval correctional institute in Seattle, Washington where the pigment was
successfully tested on the walls of inmates’ cells and credited with a
significant calming of aggressive urges. Yet despite its ability to inspire docility, pink is still picking fights,
challenging our perceptions to an aesthetic duel. Upon learning that the
British artist Anish Kapoor had signed a contract giving him exclusive rights
to a recently engineered colour known as Vantablack (the darkest shade ever
devised), and the legal right to prohibit other artists from doing so, Kapoor’s
younger contemporary Stuart Semple saw red. Emboldened by Kapoor’s black embargo, Semple began concocting a
supremely-fluorescent pink paint he contends is the “pinkest pink” ever
contemplated (“no one has ever seen a pinker pink”, he insists). As a poke in
the eye of Kapoor, Semple has made his colour available at a small price to
anyone in the world so long as they confirm that they are not Anish Kapoor nor
friendly enough with Kapoor to share it with him. En garde, Kapoor. You’ve been
pink’d.
See :
Anish Kapoor flaunts use of "world's pinkest
pink" despite personal ban from its creator. By Eleanor Gibson. Dezeen,
December 30 2016.
After some
psychologists were able to show that certain shades of pink reduced aggression,
it was famously used in prison cells to limit aggression in inmates. Yet pink
toes a shaky line. Is it a benign means of subtle manipulation? A tool to
humiliate? An outgrowth of gender stereotyping? Or some combination of the
three?
When most
people read that some are using pink to reduce aggression, they probably think,
“of course.” After all,
from birth pink is appropriated to pretty little baby girls and blue is
assigned to bouncing baby boys. In human psychology, we have come to connect
the color to femininity and its corresponding gender stereotypes: weakness,
shyness and tranquility. But according to architectural historian Annmarie Adams, pink didn’t
always automatically signal femininity. Pink became the default color for all
things girly only after World War II. Before then, it was common for girls to
wear blue, while mothers would often dress their boys in pink. Adams traces the switch back to Nazi Germany. Just as the Nazis forced
Jewish people to wear a yellow badge to identify themselves, they forced gay
men to wear a pink badge. Ever since then, pink has been thought of as a
non-masculine color reserved for girls.
Once pink started to embody femininity, some wondered
if it could be used to “tame” aggressive male behavior. Beginning in the 1980s,
a handful of prison wardens painted holding cells in prisons and jails pink.
The hope was that the color would have a calming effect on the male prisoners. The
wardens were inspired by the results from a series of studies conducted by
research scientist Alexander Schauss. Schauss had concocted a pink paint color
that he claimed could reduce the physical strength and aggressive tendencies of
male inmates. In his study, Schauss had subjects stare at a large
square of pink paper with their arms outstretched. Then he tried to force their
arms back down. He demonstrated he could easily do this as the color had
weakened them. When he repeated the same experiment with a square of blue
paper, their normal strength had returned. Schauss named the color
“Baker-Miller Pink” after two of his co-experimenters, naval officers Gene
Baker and Ron Miller. Baker and Miller were so impressed with Schauss’ findings
that they went ahead and painted the holding cells at their naval base this
shade of pink. They raved about the results and how it had pacified inmates. As
word got around about the benefits of pink décor, psychiatric units and other
holding areas were painted Baker-Miller Pink. Custodians reported quieter
inmates and less physical and verbal abuse.
All this seems like a simple, cost-effective solution
to calm inmates. However, a few years later, Schauss decided to repeat the
experiments – only to find that Baker-Miller Pink didn’t have a calming effect
on inmates after all. In fact, after conducting a test in an actual pink cell,
he noticed no difference in inmates’ behavior. He was even concerned that the
color could make them more violent. It should be noted Baker-Miller Pink is not
a pale, gentle, pastel pink. Instead, it’s a bright, hot pink. Some 30 years
later, psychologist Oliver Genschow and his colleagues repeated Schauss’
experiments. They carried out a rigorous experiment to see if Baker-Miller Pink
reduced aggressive behavior in prison inmates in a detention center cell. Like
Schauss’ later work, they found no evidence that the color reduced aggressiveness.
That might have been the end of the discussion on the benefit of pink cells.
But in 2011, a Swiss psychologist named Daniela Späth wrote about her own
experiments with a different shade of pink paint. She called her shade “Cool
Down Pink,” and she applied it to cell walls in 10 prisons across Switzerland. Over
the course of her four-year study, prison guards reported less aggressive
behavior in prisoners who were placed in the pink cells. Späth also found that
the inmates seemed to be able to relax more quickly in the pink cells. Späth
suggests that Cool Down Pink could have a variety of applications beyond
prisons – in airport security areas, schools and psychiatric units. One British
newspaper reported that prison guards were happy with the effects of Cool Down
Pink, but prisoners were less so. The newspaper interviewed a Swiss prison
reformer who said it was degrading to be held in a room that looked like “a
little girl’s bedroom.”
Herein lies
the crux of the controversy. Opponents of the practice say that the implication
that the color – with its feminine associations – will somehow reduce
aggression is, in and of itself, sexist and discriminatory. Gender studies
scholar Dominique Grisard has argued that the pink prison walls – regardless of
whether they pacify – are ultimately designed to humiliate male prisoners. Famously, in
the 1980s, the University of Iowa football team painted the visitors’ locker
room at Kinnick Stadium pink. A 2005 refurbishment added pink lockers and even
pink urinals. The reasoning behind using the pink shade, officially named
“Dusty Rose,” was much the same as that of the prison wardens: The coach,
Hayden Fry, believed it would curtail the aggression of the opposing players
and allow the home team to gain a competitive edge. Yet like the prisons, this
could be having the unintended, opposite effect. Some opposing players have
reported being more fired up by the perceived insult of the pink locker rooms. And
so the debate about the power of pink rages on. That hasn’t stopped
some from trying to deploy pink to achieve tranquility in their homes. In 2017,
model Kendall Jenner painted her living room Baker-Miller Pink – and raved
about how it made her feel much calmer. Who knows how many of her army of fans
have followed her advice. For my part – although I love pink – I shudder at the
thought of a hot pink living room, no matter how powerful its calming effects.
Can pink
really pacify? By Julie Irish. The Conversation , September 27, 2018.
Also
interesting :
Films
about luxury are often painted in exuberant colours, films about poverty in
grey palettes. But a new generation of filmmakers in recent American indie
films claims pink for the underclass.
The
Color of Money: Depicting Poverty from a New Perspective. By Nicole Davis. Mubi ,
September 24, 2018
Researchers
have found bright pink pigments in 1.1 billion year old fossils of
cyanobacteria drilled in West Africa.
Pink Was the First Color of Life on Earth. By Jason Daley. Smithsonian , July 10, 2018.
Pink Was the First Color of Life on Earth. By Jason Daley. Smithsonian , July 10, 2018.
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