On Wednesdays We Wear Pink

Eleanor
Oct 24, 2016
2 min read

Females are stereotyped as being pink and males are always traditionally stereotyped as being blue. From the day of birth and prior to this, the stereotypical shade is placed on each gender, representing their differences.

With each comes connotations and ideas surrounding the mentality of each individual. Wearing pink symbolises the girly aesthetic; inherently in the past it has represented stupidity in a woman – someone who has no emotional control.

This can be seen in the icon of Barbie for young girls and, of course, the symbolism surrounding the plastics in Mean Girls, “On Wednesdays We Wear Pink”.

It puts forward the generalised idea that a women’s motivations are surrounded mainly by her looks, beauty over brainpower.

However ‘New Wave Feminism’ has brought about the new ideology of the pink aesthetic, through online images and social media.As feminist Arvida Bystrom states ‘things are slowly evolving but we wouldn’t be here without the Riot Grrrl movement, the second wave feminist, black power and gay movements or without the suffragette movement in the early twentieth century’.

The pink label in the past could be seen as underlining the stark difference between the genders with girls liking soft, flowery, demure things. Today feminism is promoting that, as Bystrom states, that ‘the girly aesthetics are not biologically tied to a gender’. Individual women should not be seen as a woman but as ‘a person, who in some situations might be identifying herself as a woman, with loads of different sides’.

As a woman you are met with stereotypes, which sometimes connotate stupidity and girly mannerisms. As I have grown older, new wave feminism has taught me to embrace the pink aesthetic and the female empowerment it holds in current society. As Bystrom states ‘loads of females have more power today than ever before in history, so I’d say people are reclaiming and appropriating this aesthetic and bringing more seriousness and status to it’

Below I have styled and modelled three looks incorporating this pink trend.