Your answer to why everyone, everywhere is wearing pink

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Your answer to why everyone, everywhere is wearing pink

Why not celebrate what makes us different?

Somewhere around 2013, “normcore,” slipped into our collective sartorial lexicon. Enter hordes of New Balance-donning, Red Strip-clutching youth, and it was no longer en vogue to assign gender to one’s style.

A portmanteau of the words “normal” and “hardcore,” normcore is best described as a unisex fashion trend characterized by unpretentious “normal-looking” clothing. Suddenly across cities and college towns in America, exploded this grand celebration of the mundane — and almost immediately, nobody cared about anything.

New items for GALS ?

A post shared by KALEIDOO clothing (@kaleidooclothing) on Feb 24, 2017 at 9:37am PST

It became more common on (~casual) dates to make connections over similar distastes, and thus was born a generation of prematurely jaded twenty-somethings, more concerned with seeming like we “didn’t try,” than with celebrating successes — the world at our feet, but tired of it all.

Adults remained skeptical, but we knew this celebration wasn’t about dismissal at all — in fact, quite the opposite; in rejecting gendered norms, this was our own, respectful, rebellion. The New York Times even published a piece, Normcore: Fashion Movement or Massive In-Joke?.

And it was an in-joke to some extent — but we felt it a more inclusive one than the ones tossed around by our Republican uncles at the Thanksgiving table. We were rejecting norms, rejecting gender, and in doing so, accepting those whose interests did not align entirely with either.

Gender was “no longer an issue.” But it was. You wouldn’t say “I don’t see color” to a person of color, because that gives white people a pass to stop feeling guilty, erasing a history that’s inconvenient for us to recognize.

So why remove gender from clothing, instead of allowing people of all genders to wear clothing that’s been assigned to certain genders? The mission behind normcore was, in my mind, pure and good, but it went about it in the wrong way.

For years now, it’s been acceptable for women to wear men’s clothing. Tom-boys, though perhaps slightly out of the ordinary, are not seen as harmful by our society. Men wearing women’s clothing, however, has long been a point of contention. Normcore, while offering options, would still be considered “masculine” by many fashion standards.

That’s why pink has just been deemed the color of the future. Not by me alone, but by VogueGQ and other brands alike. What better way to erase gendered norms than by allowing everyone to express gender in whatever way they see fit? Especially when, for so long, femininity has been looked upon as weak and inferior.

Let boys be feminine. Let girls be masculine. Let people assign, or not assign, genders to themselves. And let whoever wants to, wear pink.

Femininity is the future, and it’s not going away any time soon.

@carolinephinney