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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Reminder that the association of pink with femininity is a recent phenomenon. Before WW2, it used to be associated with masculinity.

'In 1918, an article in Ladies Home Journal advised: “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”'

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That may be true that a century ago baby girls and baby boys in the US were associated with different colors than today, but the reasoning of "pink, being a more decided and stronger color" seems suspect to me. How come dozens of flags of countries around the world feature the color blue and approximately none feature pink (Spain and Mexico have a small amount of pink in their coats of arms). When it came down to it, the designers of the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes and all of the Tribands, etc ... none of them thought, "yeah, lets add some pink to project strength".

Baby clothes use more faded colors because of the frequent washing, so it's pink or light blue. Many countries use red in their flags.

This would also presume that the strength and colorfastness of pink and blue pigments was different 100 years ago than it was today.

Which is a very safe assumption given advancements in chemistry, textiles, and industrial processes.

Most flags that have blue don't have sky blue, they have a darker blue. If pink was as dark it would be red.

I don't know if this is the explanation, but I remember reading about how men's shirts would often be pink from blood stains after hunting and skinning animals.

Interesting. Any source on why/when the switch happened?

There’s a claim that it was a marketing scheme in the 1940s to reduce the usefulness of hand-me-downs in families. My grandmother would have lived through that and I may see if she remembers anything about it. She was definitely babysitting or watching children by 1940.

That doesn't make sense to me US textiles were in high demand, though perhaps not in pink and blue starting around 1940 and by the end of the decade US consumers were getting quite wealthy. I'm not saying it didn't happen but I'd like to see a better reason than "companies love money" since if you loved money in the 1940s there were better ways to get it than trying to do some sort of marketing campaign to reverse a social standard (using a marketing industry that was much less advanced and pervasive no less.)

It seems your argument applies to fashion in general. But fashion is a well known phenomenon. How then can your argument be valid?

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