think pink

“What’s your favourite colour?”

[Pink Roses (1881), Henri Fantin-Latour]

I used to dread having to answer this when my primary school friends and I were discussing this incredibly important subject; I felt it was a betrayal of many lovely colours to nominate just one. I then spent years answering the question by going off at a tangent and saying that it depends on what it’s with, and that in fact I’d need at least two colours in combination.

[Audrey Hepburn and a wall of bougainvillea]

But now I have the answer. And it’s pink.

This is something I’ve been working on for years, and the effort that has gone into singling out pink is not inconsiderable. It’s not a rash, spur-of-the-moment preference but a now fully-formed favourite.

After years of making quilts, knitting, sewing, looking at paintings, growing flowers, watching films, reading books, and icing cakes, I have realised that pink gives me more pleasure than any other colour. So it’s not based on what I wear - far from it - it’s all to do with optical pleasure. It’s what my eyeballs love the most.

The names alone are hard to resist: rose pink, shocking pink, hot pink, pastel pink, cherry pink, bubblegum pink, flamingo pink, Pompadour pink, china pink, hot pink, salmon pink, dusty pink, fluorescent pink, flesh pink. Pink encompasses a huge range of suggestions and allusions to history, flowers, food, and desire.

[Pussyhat march, 2017]

It also provokes so many negative reactions. People may say it’s not serious, but look at Pussyhats, Matisse’s studio, Lucie Rie bowls, Stade Français rugby kits, and the controversy surrounding boxer shorts worn by prisoners. Equally, it’s a colour that has been weaponised and subverted into something which connotes pretty, romantic, sweet, vulgar, silly, artificial, trivial, frivolous, déclassé. And what’s so wrong with all those things?

[The Pink Studio (1911) by Matisse with his distinctive pink and aqua combination]

There was a real delight in things pink from the 1950s to 1980s and everyone from the demure Grace Kelly to sex-bomb Marilyn Monroe wore pink. Then it became a question of ‘are you bad enough to wear pink?’ and it was seen as a transgressive, queer, punk colour. As one writer puts it, pink was a ‘complex cultural construct’. Ruin the fun, why don’t you? So now we have ironic pink, ambivalent pink, savage pink (my names), Mean Girls pink, post-pretty Millennial Pink. Pink carries a heavy burden but, as Hamlet says, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”.

So let’s enjoy some simple pink pleasures:

Doris Day in pink satin.

Sugar Ray Robinson’s pink suit to go with his pink Cadillac in 1950.

Mamie Eisenhower who turned the White House into the ‘Pink Palace’ and inspired a craze for pink bathrooms in the 1950s.

Kay Thompson’s wonderful Think Pink number - banish the black! burn the blue! bury the beige! - in Funny Face (1957).

Harry Styles, never knowingly underdressed.

However, there are times when you underestimate or misread pink at your peril.

The fabulous Molly Goddard smocked tulle dress worn by a psychopathic killer in Killing Eve.

Pink leather worn by top-of-the-Harvard-class Elle Woods in Legally Blonde.

Then think how dull the world would be without pink roses, peonies, bougainvillea, tulips, pinks, camellias, dahlias, cosmos.

[‘Still Life with Roses and Anemones’ (1907-87) Stella Steyn]

What would David Hockney and Marcel Proust paint and write about if they didn’t have pink blossom and pink hawthorn?

[David Hockney: spring blossom in Normandy during lockdown]

If you need any more encouragement to think pink:

a) pink is Proust’s narrator’s favourite colour, and

b) take a look at how good Hugh Grant looks in pink.

Happy Sunday!