In 1937 an Italian Launched a Pink Nobody Found Sweet

There's a pink vase on the shelf in my sitting room that I never use on its own. I always put something brown beside it, or silver, or a piece of dark wood. It took me years to notice I was doing it deliberately, as though pink needed a grown-up nearby before it was allowed in the room.

The answer wasn't in me. It was in an Italian woman who died in 1973.

The woman who put pink on the runway

Elsa Schiaparelli was born in Rome in 1890, into a conservative aristocratic family of intellectuals. She published poetry as a teenager, which already went down badly at home.

In 1913, on her way to London, she went to her first ball in Paris in a blue and orange gown she had made herself. Six years later she was in New York, moving among Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. She came back to Paris in 1922, and it was Paul Poiret who pushed her to design clothes.

She never trained in couture. Neither did her rival Chanel. Perhaps that's why both found it so easy to ignore the rules of the trade.

Her first collection, in 1927, was hand-knitted sweaters. The shop opened the following year at 4 Rue de la Paix, with a sign reading "Pour le Sport" under her name. "Pour la Ville" and "Pour le Soir" came later.

In 1931 a tennis player called Lili de Álvarez turned up at Wimbledon in a divided skirt Schiaparelli had designed. There was a public outcry. The player received death threats, and an English newspaper wrote that she should be soundly beaten for her choice of costume.

The pink

In 1937 Schiaparelli released a violent magenta and called it shocking pink. At that moment every pink in fashion was pale and well behaved. Hers was none of those things.

How the colour came about has two versions that don't match.

In Meryle Secrest's biography, the French jeweller Roger Jean-Pierre showed her some designs for pink buttons, she picked the brightest one and said, "We are going to call it Shocking Pink." In the version Kassia St. Clair tells, the socialite Daisy Fellowes was in a meeting with her wearing a bright pink Cartier diamond, and the idea came from there.

I don't know which is true, and I like that nobody does.

What Schiaparelli said about the colour is on the record. To her it was "life giving, like all the light and the birds and the fish in the world put together, a color of China and Peru but not of the West."

The fashion editor Bettina Ballard summed up her effect on the decade: she changed the outline of fashion from soft to hard, from vague to definite.

The pink went everywhere after that. With Salvador Dalí she designed a hat shaped like a shoe with a shocking pink heel. The same partnership produced the Tears dress of 1938, its fabric printed to look torn, showing a pink lining underneath. She also made a hat shaped like a lamb cutlet, buttons shaped like fish and lollipops and trapeze artists, and used cellophane and a transparent plastic called Rhodophane in evening wear.

The same year as the pink she launched a perfume, Shocking, in a bottle shaped like the film star Mae West's torso.

Women's Wear Daily wrote at the time that everywhere you went you were greeted with entire hats in that daring, sometimes glaring, petunia pink shade which had all started with her Shocking.

It didn't end well. After the war fashion turned ultra-feminine, and her hard chic stopped fitting. She had spent the conflict in New York and returned to Paris in 1945. In 1954 she stopped designing and published her autobiography, Shocking Life. She died in Paris in 1973.

The shade is still walking around without her. NARS makes a lipstick called Schiap, named after a powder box of hers that a friend of François Nars found at a flea market.

The order of the dates is the interesting part

Hold on to two of them.

The runway pink, the aggressive one, made for a woman who wanted to be seen, is 1937.

The rule that pink is for girls and blue for boys came afterwards, around the 1940s, when parents began systematically sorting children's clothes by colour. Before that pink was just a colour.

So the loud pink came first. The sweet pink was glued onto it later, by people selling baby clothes.

Then the 1980s and 90s closed the circle. Almost every toy marketed to girls came in some variation of pink, and Barbie ended up with a registered shade of her own, complete with a Pantone number. By the time that generation grew up, the colour no longer only meant "feminine". It meant too young, silly, not very competent.

Seventy years to turn a colour that frightened people into a colour that embarrasses them.

2016

Around 2016 a different pink turned up everywhere. Desaturated, slightly grey, almost deliberately ugly. It was on makeup packaging, on café walls, on book covers and on train adverts all at once.

Technically it was odd. A colour normally comes down from the runway to the high street, or climbs from the street to couture. This one did neither. It appeared on every floor at the same time. The journalist who wrote the first piece trying to explain it accidentally named it "millennial pink", and today she looks at the whole thing with suspicion. Her criticism is fair: the colour turned into a commercial shortcut, a fast way of saying "this one is for women, buy it".

Here's my opinion with no hedging: that pink was worse than the 1937 one. It had the sweetness removed so it could be taken seriously, which means it asked permission first. Schiaparelli asked permission from nobody.

What I'm keeping

There's a line that circulates as if it were a compliment. "You're not like other girls."

The designer Rachel Antonoff answers it better than I could. She says she's exactly like all the girls she found cool and clever and funny, and points out that nobody says it to a man. Then she puts the whole argument in seven words: we can be serious and like pink.

The rule stuck to the colour is about eighty years old and was invented by people selling baby clothes. You didn't sign anything.

How I actually use it

• Pink likes company. On its own it turns childish fast. With cocoa brown, cream, wood or tarnished silver it grows up immediately.
• Choose the shade by the light in your house. Blush pink under warm light is welcoming. The same shade under cool light looks unwell. Test it in the room it will live in, not in the shop.
• One pink at a time. Two shades that nearly match is the quickest way to make a table look confused.
• It works best as an accent. The napkin tie, the flower, the lipstick. An entirely pink table is a much bigger decision, and that's fine, as long as it's a decision.

After reading about her I bought a nail polish in a pink I would never normally have picked, one that goes with nothing I own. I wore it for two weeks. Slightly ridiculous, and I enjoyed it.

Tell me the last colour you stopped wearing because somebody, at some point, made you think it said something about you.

Read next

• In 1650 the English Parliament Tried to Ban Blushes — Another colour somebody tried to legislate, and lost.
• A Simple Christmas Table: Beautiful Without the Fuss — If the colour rule was invented, so was the Christmas palette.