“How One Woman’s Dreamy Pink Party Became a Heartbreaking Miss as a 5-Year-Old’s Dislike Turns the Celebration Upside Down!”
Earlier, in 1884, it was standard for boys to wear dresses until the age of seven, as it was considered gender-neutral. In the 21st century, however, this is often seen as a rebellious act against societal norms.
“It’s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing,” Jo B. Paoletti, a historian at the University of Maryland and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America, told Smithsonian Magazine. Having explored the meaning of children’s clothing for 30 years, she explained that, at one point, young children, regardless of gender, wore white dresses until around age six.
“What was once a matter of practicality—you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached—became a matter of ‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted,’” Paoletti said.
The association of pink with girls and blue with boys took hold in the 1940s, driven by American consumer preferences and marketing trends. “It could have gone the other way,” Paoletti noted. And by the 1950s, pink had become strongly associated with femininity, though “tomboy” clothing was still acceptable for play.
This trend took a pause between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, largely due to the women’s liberation movement, which rejected hyper-feminine fashion and embraced a unisex look. Paoletti even found that for two years in the 1970s, the Sears, Roebuck catalog didn’t feature any pink toddler clothing.
In the 1980s, prenatal testing became widely available, allowing parents to learn the sex of their baby before birth. This, in turn, fueled a resurgence of gendered clothing and products, as expectant parents began shopping for “girl” or “boy” merchandise, from diapers and baby clothes to strollers and toys. The rise of consumerism only reinforced these trends, leading us to where we are today.
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