Today, a boy or man can’t wear pink without it being some kind of statement, said Jo Paoletti, academic and author of “Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America.” “If you look back, little boys in the 18th century wore blue and pink, and grown-up men wore blue and pink, and ladies and little girls wore blue and pink,” Steele said.

People started thinking that for hundreds of years, blue had been for boys and pink had been for girls. Huntington’s purchase was widely publicized in the American press, Steele said. “The Blue Boy” depicted a boy dressed in blue, and “Pinkie” portrayed a girl in pink attire. Steele believes that the acquisition of two 18th-century paintings by American millionaire Henry Huntington started turning the tide in favor of pink being a girls’ color. “People were starting to think by the 1920s, because of the manufacturer’s attempt, that there was a distinction between pink and blue for boys and girls.” “There was no unanimity at all,” Steele said. Others like Macy’s in Manhattan and Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia identified pink as a girl’s color. in Manhattan and Marshall Field in Chicago branded pink as a boy’s color. In 1927, there were a lot of regional differences reported between how stores characterized the color, Steele said. Some manufacturers branded pink for boys and blue for girls, and vice versa. “In America by the 1890s and the early 20th century, manufacturers attempted to sell more children’s and infants’ clothes by color-coding them,” she said. According to Steele, the gendering of pink in America is complicated.

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