The colour pink and how the new Barbie film might subvert our expectations

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.

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.

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So ubiquitous is the build-up to Barbie’s release that you could be forgiven for thinking Lionel Messi was on the Mattel payroll when he officially signed for new club Inter Miami at the weekend, revealing his new pink number 10 jersey. The club – co-owned by David Beckham – launched its striking new kit in February and is still only one of a small handful of professional male teams to play in pink – a colour that, despite featuring heavily in recent menswear collections, is still strongly associated with women.

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 morphed into something delicate, cutesy and unthreatening after World War Two, when men went back to work, and women were retreating into the home. Two key moments, signifying two different but equally limited versions of womanhood, came in 1953 – Marilyn Monroe’s fuchsia pink gown in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the soft pink ballgown Mamie Eisenhower wore to her husband’s inauguration. The First Lady was held up as a feminine ideal, and pink was her favourite colour. It kickstarted a trend for pink clothing, interiors and appliances, which soon impacted toys too. “It was fashionable at exactly the same time as there was this absolute explosion of consumer goods and advertising becomes much more sophisticated,” says St Clair. “Pink emerged as the default colour for women and has managed to retain that for an awfully long time.”