Comme des Garçons, ensemble, fall 2016, “18th-Century Punk” Collection, fall/winter 2016, Japan, museum purchase. 2017.52.1
The usage of color “pink” in FIT exhibition aims to provoke viewers’ idea of pink as a variable, comprehensive color that has been transformed in its meaning over the decades.
This object tells how color is merely a socially constructed norm and is often a medium through which stereotypes are built. Also, the past progress in fashion indicates that the implication of color has had such a strong influence that people’s attitude towards one person and even on an entire group are given labels like those socioeconomic and political stands according to colors.
The curators of this exhibition suggests that until “pink for girls” and “blue for boys” have become one inevitable and immovable formula.
Pink is also told as both an attractive and a repulsive color. There has been so much misrepresentation and misunderstanding of this color. In this term, the curators also aim to correct such misconceptions and questions the ironies and stereotypes surrounding pink.
One of the remarkable meanings chief curator Dr. Valerie Steele tells us about the exhibition is that pink had been such a feminine color that women wearing pink meant flower, and a flower that blooms and falls. However, as she points out that pink has been positioned as a “punk, powerful, and pretty” color, we can see how it is so changeable and applicable in nowadays.
Throughout the exhibition, it is important for one to actually go through all the rooms step by step so that the intention of exhibition can be apprehended. As history preceded, society preceded and pink preceded as well.
