We have got some ridiculous color hang ups going on. Think about it…like heaven forbid you wear white after Labor Day or the fashion police will come after you and you will never grace the cover of Vogue because obviously you know nothing about fashion. Personally, I wear white as little as possible because I’ll be walking around in stains in no time, but if I want to wear white after Labor Day, I’m not going to let some rule that no one can even figure out who came up with stop me.
Then there is the whole gender divide associated with pink and blue. Pink is for girls and blue is for boys, but why? Who decided that and when? I mean babies of either gender look good in both colors, so when did the colors get assigned and why?
I started wondering after a conversation I had at a fund raiser for Luna Pie’s preschool. Someone suggested that the blue/pink color divide would make for good blog fodder. She told me that she had read somewhere that pink used to be a boy’s color and blue was a girl’s color and at some point they got switched. She also pointed out that Alice in Wonderland’s dress is blue. Huh, I thought, Alice’s dress is blue. I can’t even imagine Alice in a pink dress, that just wouldn’t be right. Now I can’t tell you how often people offer up blog topics and I politely smile and file the idea under, “I’m never gonna write about that,” but this time I was intrigued.
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So I did what I often do and took to the internet. It seems that way in the beginning, okay maybe not the beginning more like the 1800s, both baby girls and baby boys wore mostly white and they also both wore dresses. There wasn’t a concerted effort to differentiate between the sexes with colors or clothing styles, it was more about letting the babies look like babies as opposed to little adults. Colors started to come into play about mid-century, but again weren’t assigned based on gender. Then around 1890, boys’ clothing started to look more like what we are used to now and with that change more of an effort was made to differentiate between boy colors and girl colors.
But guess what? It does appear that back then pink was considered a color for boys and blue a color for girls. A 1905 Times article said pink was for boys and up until 1939 Parents magazine was saying that pink was for boys.
I can’t tell you what happened to flip the colors and what gender they belong to, but sometime after WWII it was decided that pink was for girls. Seems arbitrary to me.
Isn’t it time that we decide that colors are colors and they belong to all of us?
It is interesting. The whole thing about colors just baffle me. I remember when my boy was a baby, no matter how much blue he had on, people would come to me and say: “what a cute baby girl”. So I decided he would wear whatever colors I wanted. Still the same up to this day.
That’s so funny Yadira because both of my girls would always get called boys. We’d go to the store and I’d hear, “What a handsome little guy!” I didn’t even bother to correct people after a while.
Interesting! Wonder what caused the flip?
LOL – I know I would wear blue, but I don’t think hubby would wear pink, nor would I wear white after Easter. Some of the rules are just engraved.
Me too, I don’t wear white often but I will wear it whenever the mood hits me! That is very interesting about blue and pink…….