It is difficult to know at what semiotic moment the color pink is now, especially if we are talking about a man’s wardrobe. In recent weeks we have seen how Ryan Gosling not only wears it without blush but also dares with other pastel colors, a boldness that generates interesting micro-debates about the attributions of gender and class that we give to the colors of clothing.
But if the man in question is the President of the Government of Spain (at least for the moment) the reading of the gesture of putting on a garment becomes even more complicated. Pedro Sánchez was dressed like this on the night of his last electoral victory, he appeared in the same way for his meeting with Ana Rosa and he went with a shirt of that color to the youth podcast La Pija y la Quinqui (which will be broadcast today in its entirety on Spotify starting at twelve in the morning) the week in which the Barbie by Greta Gerwig. Has the President succumbed to Barbiecore, the pink trend that floods all women’s shop windows this summer? Is it a way of throwing a cloak at Sumar, a party that has chosen pink as its campaign color? Are you just making use of a slightly outdated gentlemen’s sport code? Is it really the way to become “posh”, since this color unequivocally had that connotation when Sánchez was young, in the eighties? The truth is that the choice, just after his pseudo blue jean shirt generated some expectation, is curious. Although no one is surprised that a man wears a pink shirt, it is not so common, however, that the shirt in question does not go under an American jacket. This is how Mariano Rajoy and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero put it before. But to see a president with a pink shirt as the main garment, you have to go back to José María Aznar.
Ryan Gosling at the Barbie premiere in Los Angeles a week ago. On his neck he wears a pendant with the initial of his wife, Eva Mendes.His was by Ralph Lauren and in it he had the unmistakable semiotic charge of this signature in the peak years of the Aznariato: Ralph Lauren was the favorite signature of the WASPs, that is, White Anglosaxon Protestants; Anyone who wore a Ralph Lauren shirt in the 1990s and 2000s did so to appropriate the symbols of that universe, that of the members of the white elites of the West Coast, descendants of the first settlers in the United States and that of the cubs of those elites, who studied at Ivy League universities.
It was precisely at the Ivy League universities (Princeton, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Columbia…) where pink was legitimized for the first time in the 20th century as an appropriate color for men. Before the 19th century it had been, too. But after the French Revolution there was a phenomenon that fashion scholars call “The Great Resignation” that totally changed the semiotics of the colors of men’s wardrobes. Until then men had donned lavish fabrics, bright colors, glittering jewelry, huge wigs, powder in their hair, and extravagant and impractical designs, just like women. Dressing colorful and exuberant like peacocks allowed them to show how wealthy they were and how little manual labor they had to do; but when revolutionary times arrived, Jacobin thought was imposing just the opposite: concealing wealth and leisure life and displaying a more austere style became fashionable (or became a me. Before the head of Marie Antoinette Before being shot under the guillotine, pink had been a unisex color.The Bourbons brought this hue to Spain, exported from the Court of Versailles, where pastel pink was seen as aristocratic while Pompeian, darker and earthier, was associated with the new bourgeoisie.
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An ad for Brooks Brothers where you can see that the pink shirt is part of their offer.
Still in the middle of the 19th century, when chemical dye was invented, cherry tones, soft pink or pale pink were common in Romanticism men’s vests. In the same way, until then newborns had been dressed in pristine white, a neutral color (all colors) that conveys the idea of tabula rasa. However, seminal events began to take place in the middle of that century for the coding of blue as the color for boys and pink as the color for girls. The decision was absolutely arbitrary, but the norm was firmly installed in the collective conscience. Only bullfighters continued to wear fuchsia pink bullfighter costumes when the color officially became “girls’.”
And the norm was not broken until in the fifties Brooks Brothers, the tailoring firm that was an official supplier of the Ivy League -they had their own store on all campuses- made the pink shirt fashionable among their kids.
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José María Aznar with a pink shirt.
The thing was like this: Brooks Brothers had already made its first pink shirt in 1900, but in the first half of the 20th century the men in suits of the first corporate capitalism only wore shirts of two colors: white, which was common among office workers, and blues, which were the standard among factory workers (in fact that’s where the terms blue collar and white collar come from). The Ivy League student shirts had very specific characteristics: they were made of cotton and were called the so-called “Oxford Button Down” (they included buttons on the neck and a pocket on the chest). When women began to arrive on the campuses of the Seven Sisters (the women’s colleges of the Ivy), Brooks Brothers tried to market again those pink shirts with which it had failed at the beginning of the century but, surprise!, who received them extraordinarily it was the boys.
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The ‘Time’ magazine report on the rose fever.
The phenomenon was spreading in such a way that Time magazine named 1955 the year of pink and devoted an extensive and unforgettable report to the matter, which comes up whenever someone wants to make a topic about pink shirts.
Those ivyleaguers that from the age of eleven they were already preparing in private schools to go to the University (which is why they began to be known as preppies) made the “daring” of wearing a pink shirt a hallmark of their tribe. And that hallmark gradually became a symbol of power and status that survived until the 1980s, when Gant, Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger repackaged it for wannabes.
![](https://smoda.elpais.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/JFK-golfing-in-salmon-GTH-pants.jpg)
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who studied at Harvard, with a daring pink pants.
It became so normalized that in the nineties it was already a standard sport for any Spaniard. “While in other European countries the use of V-neck sweaters or chino pants spread for casual Fridays or sport occasions, in Spain that place was occupied by the pink shirt,” explains the fashion editor of ICON, the men’s magazine. of this newspaper. The fashion editor of the women’s magazine (that is, this one), Leticia García, believes that this is surely the connotation with which the President has chosen his shirt: “It is not that he has put on a pink suit, like Ryan Gosling, there is no huge risk in his gesture. I think he likes that tone and wears it as a man’s basic ”.
However, pink has never completely lost its feminine connotations and in countries like Canada it is a symbol of the fight against bullying and homophobia since 2007 when two students from a Nova Scotia school reported bullying a classmate precisely for wearing a pink shirt. The next day everyone at school He was dressed in this color. The following year he did the whole country, including President Justin Trudeau, who since then has the habit of attending the LGTBIQ + Pride parade dressed in a pink shirt. As the director of the New York FIT museum, Valerie Steele, writes in her book Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color: “pink causes mixed feelings. There is always a social reaction to him.”
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Justin Trudeau at the Montreal Pride parade in 2018.
Pedro Sánchez’s pink shirt is very different from José María Aznar’s: the current President’s does not have any kind of logo anywhere, it lacks buttons on the neck and its slim fit is not suitable for all silhouettes. It looks a lot like, in fact, the ones Trudeau usually chooses when he goes to Pride. Nor does it denote the connotations that the one that Aznar wore and whose attributes had preppy are back in fashion thanks to the revival of the posh codes of the early eighties. “I grew up in Aluche and later in Tetuán, so I’m not very posh,” Pedro Sánchez explained to the protagonists of the podcast that he has chosen to wink at youth.
In 2023 many young people embrace aesthetics preppy of the ivyleaguers in a non-ironic way: all you have to do is take a walk on a school morning in front of the doors of ICADE in Madrid or ESADE in Barcelona. Many others, however, do it by giving them a twist: it is their way of circumventing the aesthetic that is supposedly reserved for the elites and that they appropriate with a mocking and quinqui spirit. As Carlos Peguer, the announcer for La Pija and La Quinqui, explained to S Moda in an interview given months ago, he, who frequently wears Ralph Lauren shirts and occupies the role of “La Pija” is far from belonging to the upper class: “I am actually totally middle class. I always buy second-hand shirts at Humana”.
In any case, if the garment that really interests the reader who has come this far is the La Quinqui shirt, she herself has explained where to get it:
Cartagena girls in case you are interested in the shirt, it is from the souvenir shop that is on the main street just about to reach the town hall square. the one next door to the old mussel farm https://t.co/tNrxlvaWKe
— mariang (@compIutense) July 14, 2023
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