 |
| Preparing for the Pink included quick shopping runs for discount shoes and accessories, even pink earplugs for the BART ride (bottom right). Shoes from AGL (top center) and Michael Kors (bottom left). |
Dental assistant: "I like your outfit. Is your favorite color pink?"
Me: "No, I hate pink. But I'm wearing it every day in April as an experiment because I really need to do something different."I've been wearing black every day since I was sixteen years old. Despite every promise I ever made to myself to wear color, I always defaulted back to black... for three decades. But not this time. I decided to commit to color for April. Not only would I avoid black for the entire month, but I forced myself to wear PINK every day because I've always hated pink. Pink is girlish. Pink is weak. I relate so little to pink that I've asked myself: Who actually wears pink?
But what could I be missing out on? Do I really hate pink? Would people treat me differently if I wore pink?
I went on a mission to find out.
The last week of March involved shopping sprees at Buffalo Exchange and Nordstrom Rack. It was surprisingly easy to shop for a color I didn't like. No mulling over the perfect look, I loathed it all. Then I told my friends, everyone at the office, and emailed my 100+ clients that I'd be wearing pink every day of April 2019, and I couldn't turn back.
It was a profound month. This is what I discovered.
 |
| Black through the years. Clockwise from upper left: Berlin in 2009 and 2007, California in 2010, Hamburg in 2010, Taiwan in 2016, and California in 2019. |
A Blast To The Past: Lingering Teenage Angst
By not wearing black, I became shockingly aware of my unconscious motivations for wearing it this whole time. My anti-pink convictions started when I was a teenager, so all my beliefs from the 80s bubbled up to the surface. Pink was the color for the mainstream, the easy color to buy in the girl's section. And especially during my high school years in Texas, pink signified girlishness, enforcing gender stereotypes, and voluntary female powerlessness. It was the color of a life unexamined. By revolting against it, I was making a statement that I was dressing more conscientiously. But after thirty years of this, it wasn't a conscientious statement anymore. It was an out-dated habit.
My other April epiphanies are as follows:
Black is the color of hiding. This was the deepest realization. High school is a time when teenage girls are insecure about their bodies and hide behind black. I remember feeling that bright colors made me feel exposed and vulnerable. Which, of course, isn't true, because no real adult ever bothers to judge another person's body. It was sad to realize that I had held on to this habit of hiding for so long. By forcing myself to wear pink, I actually experienced for myself that being visible is no big deal.
Strangely, this insight gave me a sort of a super-power vision. When I looked around myself in San Francisco and saw all those people wearing black, I could see how many of them were in hiding. It's hard to describe, it was like communicating with plants; people's black clothes were talking to me. I am the black pants of indecision. I am the black North Face jacket of uniformity. And I felt the power of not being one of the crowd.
Am I too lazy to match colors? I always thought that I wore black because I'm too lazy to match colors. But I discovered in April that throwing on random pink shades every hectic morning didn't look as garish as I thought it would. I realized colors aren't that difficult; it was more my tendency to overthink my attire that led me to wear black.
Am I too messy to wear anything but black? Coffee stains, spaghetti sauce, paw prints. Need I say more? But I cheerfully discovered in April – including cooking Indian food and shuttling my black dogs to the vet and doggy salon – that my life isn't as grimy as I thought.
It's really, really horrible to be bundled in black when the sun suddenly comes out. Time to tell the sweaty the truth. I've been there too many times, trapped, overdressed, and overheated in a black turtleneck every spring when the clouds clear and temps suddenly soar to 80 degrees. This April, I gleefully enjoyed being prepared for that spring moment and felt great sympathy for the hapless vampires around me who were still wrapped in black as they got ambushed by sunlight.
Wearing all black isn't special anymore. It used to be a sign of boldness and rebellion, but not anymore. Black has gone mainstream, with 38.5% of dresses sold in some shade of black, far outpacing the second-most popular shade, white, at 10.7% (source). Black is now the average, the default, the non-narrative. Corporations have coopted it, everyone from cosmetic staff to technicians to food runners to Oscar winners wear black. Looking around on the streets of San Francisco, I realized that to stand out, you have to wear anything but black.
Which leads us to the pink part!
 |
| I hadn't worn pink pants since I was five. |
The Month In Pink
I was strict. I wore pink for 30 days including weekends and I didn't allow myself to wear black underwear or even black yoga pants. If someone gifted me pink, I had to wear it.
Everyone's burning question... Did people treat me differently? The short answer: not really, at least not strangers. During the first three days of April, two separate strangers told me I looked beautiful, but then those were rainy, dreary days when San Franciscans were still cloaked in black. As the April sun came out and colors started to emerge from closets, I became less special and no strangers commented to me after that. (The exception was when I wore sparkly pink shoes from Attilio Giusto Leombruni, which even got heckles from moving cars on the street.)
 |
| The flats by Attilio Giusto Leombruni. |
Is pink girlish? Based on my limited field research, the answer seems to be generational. People born before 1965 said yes. In the words of one frank gentleman, "Of course pink is girlish. It's feminine because that's the color of your body parts down there." Um. Sure, why not? In his book The Prehistory Of Sex, Timothy L. Taylor argues that human female breasts and lips evolved as hominids adopted an upright posture, because standing upright hides the organs that female quadrupeds previously used to advertise their sexual readiness: buttocks and labia (i.e. round and pink). And judging from the $4.3 billion lipstick industry that relies on sex appeal for marketing, I would wager to say that color and sexual evolution are in fact connected.
Younger people I spoke to, however, did not see it so biologically. For example, when I asked "Is pink girlish?" to any under-50 man, without exception they would blink and say, "I own a pink shirt." Which didn't really answer my question. But anyway. They didn't say yes.
Pink is a natural color. Walking around in my pink clothes during another sneeze-inducing super-bloom in California, I was surprised to feel a new camaraderie with some non-human life forms: flowers. Lots of flowers. Which were the exact same color I was wearing. And yet another out-dated, unconscious pinkism came to light: I used to think the color pink was fake. Because fashion-wise, the pinkest of the pink are chemically laden colors; think nail polish, hair dyes, cosmetics, glitter. In addition, congruent to my teenage belief that pink was the color of the unexamined life, I remember thinking that those girls in my Texas high school who wore pink were fake. They were following social norms and religious norms, not being themselves.
But now I realize that nature is full of all shades of pink, especially in the spring.
 |
| Hi Flower! I relate to you. (photo: Junichiro Aoyama) |
I used to think pink was a privileged color. Black is a color of the working class. We don't have time to shop, do laundry, drink coffee carefully, or decide what to wear in the morning. And there are certain shades of pink that we seem to only see in exclusive circles (where I've honestly never been). So in the back of my mind, I believed that pink is a color of privilege. Alongside the other color I had to utilize in my non-black month: white.
But the reality? White and pink clothes cost the same (or less) than black clothes. And the average price of every item I bought for April was $22, thanks to the Buffalo Exchanges on Telegraph Avenue and Haight Street. Yet, despite my fast and frugal shopping, I felt wealthier wearing pink. Clearly it wasn't a cost issue, it wasn't even a class issue (plenty of black is unaffordable). It was a caring issue, that I looked like I cared more about what I wore.
 |
| Jacket by Escada. $2,350.00. Nope. |
It was fun wearing pink! It's impossible to discern whether I was a funner person in pink or if people were subtly reacting to me differently in pink. I enjoyed the conversations I had about color. I didn't feel like I'd lost my identity or given in to the preconceptions I had about pink from high school.
It's better to wear lots of pink than a little. Fashion discovery: committing to a color prevents you from looking messy or haphazard. I'll call it the look of color consciousness. I think differently now about colors and fashion.
What's more important than the color you wear? People didn't make more eye contact with me, strangers didn't strike up more conversation with me, people weren't more polite to me in April. (Exception: the days I wore the aforementioned pink shoes.) But what has always made a difference, no matter what color I've ever worn, is whether I'm smiling or not. Try it yourself. That experiment costs nothing.
What about another month-long project? Pink was a very social experiment that made me accountable because people saw me daily. My project in May – learning Swedish – isn't visible to others. Doing something drastically different requires its counterpart of normalcy, so for now I'll work on establishing my new norm.
Audrey Mei is a Certified Advanced Rolfer in San Francisco. Her website is www.standard-gravity.com.
