Blush is my favorite color, and has been since I was a teenager. In elementary school, my favorite crayons were salmon and rose. Pink is just gorgeous to me, and I've used it every collection since launching in 2011. It's beautiful for so many reasons: it's calm, serene, and feminine in an elegant way. Sophisticated but warm. It's inviting and says with its quiet voice "Land softly beside me and stay awhile. And when you leave you'll be the better for it." It is the epitome of wholeness and purity in my eyes. Throughout the entire decade that was my twenties, however, pink got a bad wrap.
The Neapolitan Dress | Summer 2013.
"On Wednesday's we wear pink."
This famous line from Mean Girls always makes me cringe. It invokes a saccharine Barbie Dream House hue that's obnoxious and obtrusive. It takes a perfectly happy color and turns it into an exclusionary banner. Pink stands for power, but in a mean way. Over the next few years I watched as pink meant sexy. Victoria's Secret stamped it on the bums of 13 year olds. It also meant plastic. Please watch any MTV video from the 1990's-2000's featuring Baby Spice, Mariah Carey, Mandy Moore as a teenager with a sucker in her mouth, etc. Plastic pink. Feathery pink. Pink Panther pink. Gag me with a spoon.
Then my all-time favorite version of pink: dumb pink. Elle Woods hit the big screen and suddenly pink was a caricature for all things airhead. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Legally Blonde; but Elle's obsession with pink everything drove home the theme that she couldn't be taken seriously. Pink isn't serious, and anyone who likes pink is unprofessional at best, and stupid at worst. Her persona wouldn't have made nearly as much sense if she'd been obsessed with blue. Nope. Pink made her dumb.
It's not pink's fault. We've taken its cheerful nature and turned it into a déclassé, new-money color that simply doesn't know when to shut its mouth. We've thrown glitter on its Mylar dress, given it a Pepto pink pleather jacket, jolted it with Sweet-N-Low, and then sent it to a fancy cocktail party. Of course there are guffaws and eye rolls. Amateur is its moniker.
Pink has been the color ambitious girls wear when they're not bold enough to put on a womanly red. Its the stuff of dress-up and play-pretend, that only leaves you with a stomach ache.
Looks from the runway | Spring 2013
Luckily for me (and humankind) 2010 rang in a new decade in pink. If you haven't heard of it yet, let me introduce you to the most sophisticated pink out there: Millennial Pink. Ranging from light blush to almost cotton candy, this color is the It Girl in fashion, marketing, social media, and design. There are several well-written articles that explain the evolution of pink across various industries, so I'll not reinvent the wheel. Check them out here and here. They're definitely worth the read! This decade's version of pink is what I've envisioned all along. Stylish and practical. Bold but not fussy or over-dressed. Well-edited althleisure, not boas and platform stilettos. THIS color is an adult, in the most serene and composed way. Suffice it to say this color's not going anywhere for awhile, and I'm painted pink about it.