[Today’s donation was made to House of GG. Click here to see my Pride & Joy Project 2020 Daily Donations List.]
Fashion is art, and like all forms of art, it blurs the line between appreciation and appropriation.
Take the camouflage (or camo) print, for example. As a fashion choice, this very popular print is the opposite of its original intention. It was designed so soldiers can blend in with the environment. What was intended to be used as an invisibility cloak in a life-and-death situation is now a garment created to grab attention. It’s absolutely useless when worn in the concrete jungle, especially in colors that don’t even remotely resemble leaves or the earth or snow. Like pink.
Even before I had the notion of masculine colors and feminine colors, I’d always loved pink. I love strawberry ice cream simply because it’s pink. My old Geocities blog was all pink.
One hundred years ago, pink was a boy’s color because of its proximity to red. Then on January 20, 1953, Mamie Eisenhower stepped into the inauguration ball of her husband, President Dwight Eisenhower, with a pink Nettie Rosenstein peau-de-soie gown decorated with over 2,000 rhinestones. The country (and the world) perception of the color pink changed. Pink was Mrs. Eisenhower’s favorite color. As a military wife, she moved around a lot, and always carried a swatch of pink, green, and cream (her favorite colors) and used them as the color scheme to paint her new house (including the White House). This helped her settle in.
Thanks to her, pink is now identical to Barbie dolls and Disney princesses and Hello Kitty. Mean Girls became 100 times more significant because it singles out this color and launched #onWednesdayswewearpink. And the Pink Power Rangers is always a girl.
Fun fact: there’s a chapter in my book, Gentlemen Prefer Asians, about the time my dad bought me a GogglePink costume because I wanted it. (Goggle V are like the original Power Rangers.)
Even before I had the notion of masculine colors and feminine colors, I’d always loved pink. I love strawberry ice cream simply because it’s pink. My old Geocities blog was all pink. Mean Girls became 100 times more significant because it singles out this color and launched #onWednesdayswewearpink.
And apparently, my skin color goes great with all shades of pink.
These boy-shorts are from Pikante. I love the somewhat gaudiness of pink camo print and the way the construction flatters my butt.
Photography by Yuska Lutfi Tuanakotta.
BONUS:
Here’re the photos my dad took. The first was at my grandpa’s house in Bogor during our Sunday visit. The second was at our old house in Jakarta. The watermark says 1989. I was six years old.
