In the summer of 2016, I started to see a predominant shade bubbling up on everything that was marketed to me. Rather than being some dictated-from-on-high runway “color of the season,” this was something aimed at the masses, backgrounding subway ads and filling the windows of high-end boutiques.
It was a variation on the pink shade I’d always associated with girlhood, not necessarily my girlhood, but the concept at large. But instead of being the saccharine Barbie pink that brings to mind a disembodied squeal of “Accessories sold separately!,” it was a weirdly desaturated hue that seemed stripped of all associations with bubble gum and Sweet Valley High book spines. I saw it on tubes of Glossier makeup, on the walls of the newly sprouted women’s club The Wing, and on what felt like every Instagrammable book aimed at women in my cohort—late twenties and early thirties—from Sweetbitter to #GIRLBOSS.
The color seemed to defy the generally accepted order of fashion, in which a trend trickles down from high to low (think of the famous “cerulean speech” from The Devil Wears Prada) or trickles up from low to high (think of high fashion’s recent embrace of sweatsuits and Crocs). Instead, it came from seemingly nowhere, and quickly blanketed every tier of design. Everything from the high-end Swedish brand Acne Studios to ads for Thinx period underwear used some variation of this shade.
I wrote an essay for The Cut, New York magazine’s women’s vertical, examining the idea, attempting to separate this strain of the color from the pure Elle Woods version. “The titration of actual pinkness varies a little, but it’s still a fairly narrow spectrum—from salmon mousse to gravlax,” I wrote. “It’s a non-color that doesn’t commit, whose semi-ugliness is proof of its sophistication.” I was just trying to tease out a cultural curiosity, but along the way, I ended up stumbling into coining the term millennial pink, a phrase that has gone on to make untold millions for…people who are not me.
In the story, I traced the phenomenon to a generational mood of “ambivalent girliness.” Women my age were starting to embrace the gendered tics we’d been told would hold us back in the workplace, like vocal fry or punctuating phrases with “like” and “um.” Now we could embrace makeup—provided it was the kind that skimmed, rather than spackled, a canvas of perfect skin, and that came with collectible stickers. We could be bosses, though we’d probably use the awkward portmanteau girlboss, so as not to threaten anyone. We could lead while wearing sweatshirts and sneakers and nail art in that hyper-identifiable shade of curdled pink.
Bookshop.org
There are certainly things to embrace about this color, but a lot of its more questionable aspects got power-washed away by the frantic media coverage. Most people who’ve used the phrase millennial pink did not learn about it from my essay, but even I was surprised at how divorced the term became from its origin. It had been reduced purely to its consumerist id: “Here are more things to buy in this color you love!”
My lazy coinage had gone viral, and pink’s hegemony was complete. My life quickly became a chromatically themed Groundhog Day. I got daily press releases pointing me to the best “millennial pink” artwork, snacks, Airbnbs, and blushes. People at parties explained the definition to me, usually incorrectly. I went to a pink-branded Pilates studio that, like so many things in this hue, seemed to exist mostly for Instagram; its wan rosy lights, embedded in small, shrine-like structures in its walls, lit us as we studiously planked. I went to an all-pink restaurant in Nolita where the food was, mercifully, not pink. EverywhereI turned, I was swaddled in pink, as sticky with it as though I’d stepped in bubble gum, longing for the embrace of a cool blue or green.
When I revisit my original story, the whole phenomenon feels more insidious than I once thought, especially as I consider how the past few years have unfolded. I wonder if this period in fashion history, with its toothless pastels and sweet, ruffled, Regency-style minidresses—the sartorial version of millennial pink—will come to be seen as analogous to the ’80s fashion backlash against strong-shouldered power suits worn with sneakers.
The prairie look has come back at a time when the ironic distance between dress-up and reality has narrowed. Abortion rights are being rolled back; the gender pay gap has barely budged. In a more progressive time, reverting to signifiers of old-fashioned repression might feel like an interesting choice; right now, it’s getting harder to separate the hipsters from the handmaids.
We’re in a time when traditional femininity has been repackaged as cool, as chill, as woke. The all-things-pink beauty brand Glossier commands us to be a body diversity–embracing “Body Hero” as part of its campaign to sell lotion and body wash; The Wing (with an influx of series B funding from corporate giant WeWork) has been touted as “reviving the radical women’s club movement,” according to a Vice story. (What, exactly, is radical about an institution that costs roughly $2,000 a year?) One of the most confounding things about the pink-tinted economy is the way it’s selling back existing things to us and making them “new,” painting them as essentials of self-actualization and empowerment. An elite women’s club isn’t new. Nor is makeup. Nor is a modest floral garment. Nor is pink. What we have here is a rebranding of the reactionary.
Even the social justice movement recently took a page from this playbook, employing pastel-hued Instagram tiles that outlined steps to, say, defund the police. Abstruse concepts were made palatable through design, in a process akin to embedding spinach in a cupcake. You needed to squint at your screen to tell the difference between a direct-to-consumer deodorant brand and an instruction manual for dismantling the police state. Whatever the content of these infographics—some were clear and concise, while others possessed only a distant-cousin relationship to facts—it was as though the intended audience for these messages couldn’t absorb them unless they were presented like this, swathed in the fondant of peachy backdrops and swooping serif fonts. The medium wasn’t just the message; it had swallowed the message whole.
I had long thought the neoliberal version of this aesthetic, steeped as it was in a wishy-washy, consumerist centrism, was irritating enough. The moment I realized we were officially living in a simulation was when millennial pink and its siblings on the color wheel began being used to launder QAnon conspiracy theories pushed by lithe influencers of the yoni egg variety. This sensibility was pervasive enough that academic Marc-André Argentino coined the term “pastel QAnon” to describe it. The inverse of bellicose masculine aesthetics, none of these posts featured warlike eagles or brightly colored flags.Instead, they’d been polished to a high gloss, rendered as colorful and gulpable as a gummy vitamin. They were designed to appeal to a young, female audience poised to lap up wellness tips, parenting content—and the occasional Pizzagate conspiracy, child trafficking theory, or anti-vax screed along with them. In one typical example cited by Argentino, an arrangement of pink and white balloons, the kind you might see at a baby shower, spelled out “COVID IS OVER” (it wasn’t), against a millennial pink background. The accompanying text urged us to “Open up our country” and insisted on “No masks.” The image was persuasive to its intended audience in a way that a cardboard sign bearing the same message in Sharpie would not be. Another said, in the kind of curvy, slightly groovy orange font that might once have adorned the cover of a ’60s consciousness-raising manual, “wayfair scandal” (capital letters would evidently have been too strident), followed by “What You Need to Know,” before devolving into the child-trafficking conspiracy centered around a popular furniture website.
Mimicking the structure and design of social justice posts that broke down, say, “10 Steps to Non-Optical Allyship,” this imagery seemed aimed at an audience that might consider themselves liberal, or simply apolitical, but was open to “just asking questions.” Its populist success coasted on the wake of similarly designed graphics featuring morally good-to-neutral things. I had assumed the style would fall out of favor eventually, not metamorphose into something troubling. But now completely opposed ideologies had visually melted into each other in a way that made me think about the banality of evil. It wasn’t that the aesthetic itself was evil, of course; it was that, like all aesthetics, it had gone from novel to trite, and its new-found banality was able to cloak any horrors that might be smuggled into it. We had now arrived at a point where everything looked alike, regardless of what it meant.
Ultimately, millennial pink under some other name would have triumphed without my input. I felt no ownership of, or claim to, the color; I was merely there as a chronicler. Yet I did feel strangely culpable every time I saw the next step in its evolution, from stealth capitalism to earnest neoliberalism to stealth fascism; it was like watching a dimly remembered classmate cycle through a series of increasingly incoherent ideologies before landing squarely on the worst one. When a group of people espousing assorted far-right views succeeded in battering their way into Congress, I saw a number of women among them, and wondered how many had been radicalized by something they saw in a pastel square. ▪
EXCERPTED FROM DRESS CODE. COPYRIGHT © 2022 BY VÉRONIQUE HYLAND. REPRINTED HERE WITH PERMISSION FROM HARPER PERENNIAL, AN IMPRINT OF HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS.
This article appears in the March 2022 issue of ELLE.
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