Since when do we dress girls in pink and boys in blue?

If the collective imagination associates pink with femininity today, it is a recent social construction, reinforced by gendered marketing.Until the 19th century, boys and girls wore white, and even dresses, without anyone offending it!

We read a little and anything about the symbolism of colors in our Western societies.The thing is that they mean several things at the same time, and can be tinted with different connotations, at the same time, depending on the contexts and social classes.So add gender marketing to children applied to children, and you get an anything but futile story: why and how brands encourage us to dress little boys in blue and little pink girls ... in order to generate a maximum of profit.

In antiquity, red and pink are virile

Schematically, since antiquity, in Europe, red symbolizes power and authority.It is therefore a color perceived as rather virile.As a derivative, pink is then also male connoted.This clear shade is popular from the Renaissance, because we can more easily fix it on textiles thanks to Brazil wood.Thank you colonization!

For its part, blue is worn both by men and women.It is even the color in which we represent the Virgin Mary, and therefore the predilection shade for many birth trousseaux of little girls.

Even if Madame de Pompadour, defendant of Louis XV and influencer Mode of the time, manages to make the pink popular for women in the court in the middle of the 18th century, it is only an episodic trend that does not'Subsequently installs.

Until the Middle Ages, white for children: it's easier to wash

En gros, jusqu’à la fin de l’époque médiévale, les enfants sont surtout habillés en blanc, symbole de pureté… et facile à laver puisqu’on peut faire bouillir les linges de bébé sans craindre de les décolorer ! On faisait quand même attention à déshabiller ledit bout de chou et le laisser dans un coin, histoire de ne pas l’ébouillanter avec l’eau du bain de la lessive, on vous rassure.

In the end, until the Middle Ages in the West, children's clothes are not gendered.It's dresses for everyone.Let us quote a few touches of colors, unlike today, as explained by the historian Emmanuelle Berthiaud in France Culture:

Protestant reform sees men in black or blue, and women in red

But the Protestant reform initiated in the 16th century imposes a new symbolism and hierarchy of colors.During this period of disenchantment of the world (even before Mylène Farmer sings it), the dark shades from black to blue become synonymous with dignity - and therefore of masculinity - while red becomes the color of love, therefore emotionsand femininity.

Until the 19th century, when you can afford a beautiful dress to hope for sin at the local ball, we want it rather red.It’s even the favorite color of wedding dresses in the peasant world!

Progress in dyeing has prepared the field for gendered marketing

As, in parallel, we master the chemistry of colors better and better and dyeing textiles, this progress becomes less expensive and can apply to children's clothing, continues the historian with the radio chain:

Precisely, the affirmation of blue for boys, but especially pink for girls forms the perfect playground for gender marketing to develop in the middle of the 20th century.Encourage parents to buy different clothes depending on the kind of their children?The ideal vein that brands sell even more!

This is what the American fashion historian sums up, Jo B.Paoletti, in his book Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America:

In other words, making a well -genred separatism with toy and clothing rays is the best way to create a feeling of rejection or usurpation from the little boys if they are offered a small pink car or fuchsia pants.

And if little girls seem less refractory to the idea of using blue clothes or toys, it is surely because even children integrate the social construction of hierarchy between genres very early ... and they too associate theblue with strong sex, neutral, not infamy, unlike boys with pink.

Blue and pink, the cradle of dominations

It is this same hierarchy of genres that explains why so many brands can be content to offer male clothes by marketing them as "unisex" to attract women without scareing men.History to give the impression of new social progress, without making an effort or taking any risks!Because daring the flamboyance of a fully gender-free fashion is rubbing shoulders with misogyny, and therefore potentially selling less product ...

A boy in pink can arouse questions, not to say suspicion, because it is a gendered color as belonging to "weak sex", in our patriarchal society which perceives female things as less important than male attributes.This hierarchy also sheds light on the interest of women's fashion borrowings in the locker room: because they are the clothes of power.Socially, girls derive profits from the male wardrobe, while boys can be stigmatized if they commit the opposite, unfortunately.

But as people are interested in educating their children in a gender way, perhaps we will finally see the end of this marketing Machiavellianism, which reproduces and strengthens inequalities between women and men from the cradle.

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