Margot Robbie wears pink Chanel 5230Q Patent ...[+]

Barbie (2023)

Barbiecore has permeated nearly every crevice of consumerism, with art and auction world heavyweights promoting pink products that have sudden mass market appeal. In a city where head-to-toe black attire is proof of residency, New Yorkers of all ages are donning pink, particularly a shade of magenta-pink that Pantone created with hexadecimal color code #e0218a.

There’s no doubt that Barbiecore on steroids and stilettos is bursting at its figure-hugging seams, but fascination with the color is hardly a new phenomenon.

Before we had the term for the color that’s woven into many eras of fashion and cultural history, pink was recognized as a concept by Homer in 800 B.C. There are variations, and Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of The Odyssey gives us a few lines that conjure present-day Barbiemania.

"When early Dawn shown forth with rosy fingers"

"Soon Dawn appeared and touched the sky with roses"

"When rose-fingered Dawn came bright and early"

"Early the Dawn appeared, pink fingers blooming"

"When newborn Dawn appeared with hands of flowers"

"Then Dawn was born again; her fingers bloomed"

For Homer, Dawn is an allusion to Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, a time of day, and a color that didn’t have its own name until the 17th century when a Greek botanist used it to describe the ruffled edges of carnations. By the mid-18th century, men and women, boys and girls, of the aristocracy began wearing it to flaunt their social status.

More subtle uses of pink in art history became prevalent in the 13th century.

In the early Renaissance, the infant Jesus sometimes was adorned in pink fabric, the color associated with the body of Christ, in works such as The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Two Angels (circa 1265–1280), by Cimabue, an Florentine painter and designer of mosaics.

In the 1280s, Duccio, a highly influential Italian painter active in Siena, Tuscany, painted the Christ child clad in pink. The Christ Child hands a pink flower to the Virgin Mary to symbolize the bond between the mother and child in High Renaissance master Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks (circa 1506-07).

Thomas Lawrence 'Sarah Barrett Moulton: Pinkie' ...[+]

Huntington Library, San Marino, California

Various shades of pink gained widespread popularity throughout Europe by the late 18th century for its associations with romance and romanticism, in works such as the pale pink dress representing youthful innocence in the portrait of Sarah Moulton, better known as "Pinkie," by Sir Thomas Lawrence (1794).

Edgar Degas 'Dancers in Pink' (1880-1885)

ill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Conn.

In 19th century England, pink became the color of choice for boys’ attire, who were regarded as small men, while men wore red. Girls wore it, too, as evidenced in artworks such as the vivacious Dancers in Pink (1876) by Edgar Degas.

It seems that art history was forgotten by the mid-20th century, when pink became a girl color in high fashion and film. First Lady Mamie Eisenhower wore a pink inaugural gown in 1953, sparking a trend that’s also attributed to the 1957 musical Funny Face.

There’s a dark side, of course, particularly when Nazis required concentration camp inmates who were accused of being homosexuals to wear a pink triangle, a symbol that’s since been subverted by the LGBT community as illustrated by Keith Haring’s Silence Equals Death.

Keith Haring 'Silence Equals Death' 1989 ...[+]

Phillips

(Barbie movie star Margot Robbie may have read Homer when she studied drama at Somerset College, and it’s unclear if the pink Chanel 5230Q Patent Leather sunglasses worn by the titular character would impede or speed the journey.)

Natasha Gural

A multiple-award-winning journalist, I’ve held top editorial rol…

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