![]() ![]() But it wasn’t until the 1950s that pink took on a “girly” persona: Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, told The Atlantic that pink was once “considered slightly masculine as a diminutive of red,” which was a “warlike” color. Like most things heavily associated with girlhood and forced femininity, hot pink embodied a fraught, gendered past-in some ways representing the worst of what men wanted women to be-and Barbie’s adoption of the color further complicated that past. Culmone cites 1977’s Superstar Barbie as one of the first head-to-toe pink looks, as well as Beauty Secrets Barbie, a doll designed by Kitty Black Perkins, who also designed the first Black Barbie. By 1976, Barbie dolls were packaged in full hot pink and paired with the now-quintessential “bubble” font. Around 1972, shocking pink showed up in Barbie’s wardrobe, when Mattel introduced the Best Buy Fashion line. As is now toy lore, the first Barbie was modeled after German call girl and gag gift doll Bild Lilli, and hit the market in a striped, black-and-white swimsuit in 1959. Mattel’s head of design for Barbie, Kim Culmone, told Jezebel that Barbie pink-the brand’s signature Pantone color, PMS 219-became “very prominent in the Barbie design language” in the ‘70s. “This pink is like the most extreme version of what girliness could be, almost mocking or laughing at it in a way, while totally embracing it.” Littered with hearts, like moths drawn to a light, “it has this very forced sense of girly-ness: over the top, overly sexualized, overtly in your face,” she described. And I like that about it.”Ĭhamberlain points to her hot pink Madonna ruffle veil, for which she pulled inspiration from Vegas show girls and the Madonna Inn. The only natural associations we have with it are flamingos and flowers like mountain pinks and hydrangeas, so in a lot of ways, it feels unnatural. “But in a way, pink is also the most pushed extreme…the boldest color you can get. “Pink is just such a dopamine hit of a color,” Chamberlain told Jezebel. Her core customer base, which she describes as “nontraditional brides,” comes to her for her over-the-top pink gowns and pink, ostrich feather veils, as if to throw daggers at the rest of the bridal industrial complex. ![]() Today’s hot pink has retained its biting spirit, which is, in part, why it’s a key tenet of fashion designer Madison Chamberlain’s brand identity. “Bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life-giving, like all the lights and the birds and the fish in the world put together.” Later, Darling points out, Yves Saint Laurent described the same color as “having the nerve of red…an aggressive, brawling warrior pink.” “The color flashed in front of my eyes,” Schiaparelli said. ![]() In 1931, fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli captured those contradictions when she invented a new pigment by mixing magenta with a bit of white. But “to pink” had another meaning: to stab. ![]() Though its origins are murky, some sources point to the 17th century use of the term “pinks” to describe flowers with jagged petals-carnations, sweet williams, and maiden pinks among them. Pink is an exercise in contradictions, delicate and violent in the same breath. At the Barbie premiere this month, Trixie showed up most of the cast’s pink carpet looks, surely in part because she, like Darling, didn’t need Greta Gerwig’s campy film to discover pink’s subversive side.īarbies in various shades of Barbie pink Photo: Mattel Darling bonded with one such client, drag queen Trixie Mattel, over their shared love of pink and all things Barbie, which they both still collect as adults (“I’m sure a therapist would have a field day with what exactly that means,” Darling laughs). She loves the sweeping rosy texture of blush, a product she insists never goes out of fashion as she applies it liberally to the cheeks of her clients. Unlike the original, this Barbie’s swimsuit is pink.ĭarling, a makeup artist, is somewhat of a pink evangelist. In photos, you can see how stubborn it is in its girlhood, with figurines of Betty Boop and Marilyn Monroe, pink-stained pillows, and in the corner, Darling’s life-size Barbie mannequin. The all-pink home, as featured in Apartment Therapy in 2010, went quasi-viral, she remembers. Darian Darling is living her dream life in her dream house-that is, her very own life-size Barbie Dreamhouse. ![]()
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