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Mattel - Barbie Pink Collection

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It wasn't always the way. As Kassia St Clair, a cultural historian and author of The Secret Lives of Colour, notes, the girl-pink/boy-blue divide didn't set in until the mid-20th Century. An 1893 article on baby clothes in The New York Times stated that you should "always give pink to a boy and blue to a girl." Pink was seen as the stronger colour – a relative of the passionate, aggressive red, while blue was the signature hue of the Virgin Mary. "My father was born in 1925, he's a military man and yet pink is his favourite colour and he doesn't see anything peculiar about that," St Clair tells BBC Culture. "But for me, growing up as a child of the 80s and 90s, of course, pink was very much a feminine colour, and I had it shoved down my throat. So for a long time, I completely avoided pink. I was fed up with it. I had a very complicated relationship with it."

Pink Barbie - Etsy UK

In the film, too, pink is for everyone – including Ken. And although one movie – or one world-famous footballer wearing pink – is unlikely to singlehandedly change our perception of pink as a gendered colour, our fraught relationship with it might be shifting. "Shorthands and clichés are very powerful and it's difficult to escape them," says St Clair. "I think what is changing is there's a loosening of the idea that pink is a limiting colour and that pink means something lesser than blue. There's a power and a knowingness with the way that pink is used now. It's coming with a wink."verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Especially millennial women who grew up with Barbie — specific aesthetic lines are blurred more and more every day," Johnson tells InStyle. You can mix the vacation look with the workplace look, or mix styling genres, like pretty and punk. Her advice? Shop for pieces that are "simple, sleek, and can mix and match for any occasion." The past decade has been another complicated one for the colour. Millennials even had their own shade of pink – but this watered-down hue was an almost apologetic version. "The kind of pinks that have done really well in the past few years and transcended girliness have been yellow and grey-based pinks, instead of the blue-based pinks, like Barbie pink and Legally Blonde pink," says St Clair.

Pink Barbie Costume - Etsy UK Pink Barbie Costume - Etsy UK

Barbie fans love Margot Robbie’s Architectural Digest tour of Dreamhouse: ‘Came out of a fairytale book’ Around this time, pink also emerged as a symbol of celebration, self-identification and pride in the LGBTQ+ community – who in the 1970s reclaimed the colour from its dark past in Nazi Germany, when pink triangles were used to identify gay prisoners in concentration camps. In the 1980s, the pink triangle became a sign of resistance, featuring on posters during the Aids crisis, and remains a powerful symbol in the queer community. Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world. Does it feel like you're looking at the world through rose-tinted spectacles right now? You're not alone. If summer 2023 has a colour, then it is undoubtedly pink, and it's all down (mostly) to one woman: Barbie.

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If all this showed how powerful pink could be, some harnessed that power to their advantage. Politicians like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi embraced pink suits – a way to subtly wield authority while also reassuring that they weren't a threat. This idea was explored in popular culture, too. In Legally Blonde, the pink-obsessed Elle Woods (played by Reese Witherspoon) is dismissed as a dumb blonde – but lands a place at Harvard Law School ( "What, like it's hard?") and graduates top of her class. So, as Barbie makes the colour inescapable once again, what does it represent now? Director Greta Gerwig said she wanted to make "something anarchic and wild and completely bananas", and says "it most certainly is a feminist film... in a way that includes everyone." (Although Mattel themselves beg to differ). Actor America Ferrera was drawn to the film because it confronts Barbie's role in "shaping expectations for women" and her character Gloria – assistant to Mattel's CEO and mother of a teenage daughter – delivers a pivotal monologue that Margot Robbie says "captures the cognitive dissonance of being a woman under the patriarchy". So, how can Barbiecore translate into your wardrobe? Well, pink does remain Barbie's go-to shade. "Pink has always been Barbie's favorite color — she even has her own signature 'Barbie Pink' Pantone shade, PMS 219," says Culmone. "For Barbie, pink represents limitless potential and is a symbol of female empowerment, which is such a perfect fit with the brand's purpose." The new live-action film about the iconic doll, starring Margot Robbie and directed by Greta Gerwig, has leant right into Barbie's association with the colour, its set designers working with a palette of 100 different shades, and apparently contributing to a global shortage of pink paint. The movie's all-conquering marketing campaign has left a sea of pink wherever it goes, from billboards, buses and the cast's (pink) carpet outfits to a real-life Barbie Dreamhouse on Airbnb, more than 100 brand tie-ins and a Google takeover.

Pink Barbie Shirt - Etsy UK Pink Barbie Shirt - Etsy UK

This was the case for CULTNAKED founder Mary Furtas, who tells InStyle that hand-sewing Barbie clothing is what allowed her first to explore her creativity as a fashion designer. "I experimented with my first ever designs on her," says Furtas. "I think a lot of designers first grew interested in the field by doing that."

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