Unraveling the Colorful History of Why Girls Wear Pink and Boys Wear Blue

Children used to wear the same white dresses, regardless of gender. But clothing styles and color preferences shifted in the mid-20th century

Jeanne Maglaty; Updated by Meilan Solly

Updated: April 23, 2025 | Originally Published: April 7, 2011

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Two-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt sits primly on a stool, his white skirt spread smoothly over his lap, his hands clasping a hat trimmed with a feather. Shoulder-length hair and patent leather party shoes complete the ensemble—a fashionable look for young boys in 1884, the year the future United States president sat for this portrait.

During the Victorian era, social convention dictated that boys wear dresses until about age 6 or 7, when they transitioned to trousers as part of a coming-of-age tradition known as “breeching.” By the early 1920s, however, most children in Western countries started dressing along gender lines, with boys in pants and girls in dresses. Around this same time, another gender-related fashion trend gained traction in the U.S. and the United Kingdom: namely, the association between boys and the color blue and girls and the color pink.

Why have young children’s clothing styles changed so dramatically? And how did we end up with these two competing color camps?

“It’s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing,” Jo B. Paoletti, the author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys From the Girls in America, told Smithsonian magazine in 2011. “What was once a matter of practicality—you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers, [and] white cotton can be bleached—became a matter of ‘Oh, my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted.’”

Pink for boys and blue for girls

The march toward gender-specific clothing was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue, along with other pastels, emerged as popular colors for babies in the mid-19th century, but it took time for their status as gender signifiers to be confirmed.

In June 1918, for example, a trade publication called the Infant’s Department reported, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” According to Paoletti, other sources said blue was flattering for blondes and pink for brunettes, or blue was for blue-eyed babies and pink for brown-eyed babies.

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing appropriate colors for girls and boys, in the view of leading U.S. department stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Company in New York City, the Halle Brothers Company in Cleveland and Marshall Field’s in Chicago. Four other stores across the country advised the exact opposite.

Pink was historically “related to the mother color of red, which was ardent and passionate and more active, more aggressive,” Leatrice Eiseman, a color expert and the executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, told CNN in 2018. “Even though you reduce the shade level [to make pink], it was a color that was associated with boys.”

Based in large part on Paoletti’s research, scholars, book authors and the media have argued that blue’s connection with boys and pink’s with girls wasn’t solidified until the mid-20th century. Prior to that point, many sources state, the gendered nature of the colors was either reversed or at best inconsistent (Paoletti’s original argument, which has since been misconstrued as a total reversal). But data analyzed by Marco Del Giudice, a psychologist at the University of New Mexico, complicates this picture.

In 2012, Del Giudice published a paper refuting the “pink-blue reversal,” as he called it. After searching a database of more than five million books published in the U.S. between 1880 and 1980, he found many examples of the standard “blue for boys” and “pink for girls” association, but virtually none for the reverse. The results, Del Giudice wrote, showed “remarkable consistency in gender coding over time” rather than a sharp shift around the 1940s, leading him to conclude that the magazine excerpts often cited as proof of the reversal were anomalies, not indicators of widespread cultural trends.

Interestingly, Del Giudice’s follow-up analysis of U.S. newspapers and magazines published between 1881 and 1930 yielded results more in line with Paoletti’s findings. He recorded 34 instances of the standard color coding and 28 instances of the reverse—much closer numbers than seen in books published around this same time frame. “Pink-blue gender coding showed a certain degree of inconsistency (though not a reversal) between the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” Del Giudice wrote in his 2017 study. “However, the true extent of that inconsistency is still unclear, as different kinds of sources return dramatically different pictures.”

The rise and fall—and rise again—of unisex clothing

Regardless of whether pink and blue flip-flopped at some point or remained relatively steady, both Paoletti and Del Giudice agree that the now-accepted color dictate only grew stronger over the 20th century, reflecting Americans’ preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers. “It could have gone the other way,” Paoletti said.

In postwar America, young baby boomers (generally defined as those born between 1946 and 1964) were raised in gender-specific clothing. Boys dressed like their fathers, girls like their mothers. Girls had to wear dresses to school, though unadorned styles and tomboy clothes were acceptable for recreation.

When the women’s liberation movement took off in the mid-1960s, the unisex look became all the rage, but completely reversed from the time of the young Roosevelt. (Paoletti examined this trend in her 2015 book, Sex and Unisex: Fashion, Feminism and the Sexual Revolution.) Now, young girls dressed in masculine—or at least unfeminine—styles, devoid of gender hints. Paoletti found that for two years in the 1970s, the Sears, Roebuck & Company catalog pictured no pink toddler clothing.

“One of the ways [feminists] thought that girls were kind of lured into subservient roles as women is through clothing,” Paoletti said. “‘If we dress our girls more like boys and less like frilly little girls … they are going to have more options and feel freer to be active.’”

Beginning in the 1960s, John Money, a sexual identity researcher at Johns Hopkins University, argued that gender was primarily learned through social and environmental cues. Though his methods are now considered controversial, Money’s research became “one of the drivers back in the ’70s of the argument that it’s ‘nurture, not nature,’” Paoletti said.

Gender-neutral children’s clothing remained popular until about 1985. Paoletti remembers that year distinctly because it was between the births of her children, a girl in 1982 and a boy in 1986. “All of a sudden, it wasn’t just a blue overall; it was a blue overall with a teddy bear holding a football,” she said. Disposable diapers were manufactured in pink and blue.

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Prenatal testing was a big reason for the change. Expectant parents learned the sex of their unborn baby and then went shopping for “girl” or “boy” merchandise. (“The more you individualize clothing, the more you can sell,” Paoletti said.) The pink fad spread from sleepers and crib sheets to big-ticket items such as strollers, car seats and riding toys. Affluent parents could conceivably decorate for baby No. 1, a girl, and start all over when the next child was a boy.

Some young mothers who grew up at the height of second-wave feminism rejected the unisex look for their own daughters. Deprived of pinks, lace, long hair and Barbies during their own childhoods, these women pushed back against the notion that gender equality meant refuting femininity. “Even if they are still feminists, they are perceiving those things in a different light than the baby boomer feminists did,” Paoletti said. “They think even if they want their girl to be a surgeon, there’s nothing wrong if she is a very feminine surgeon.”

Another important factor in the return of gendered clothing has been the rise of consumerism among children. According to child development experts, most children become conscious of their gender around age 2 and develop a stable sense of their gender identity by age 4. At the same time, they are constantly surrounded by sophisticated and pervasive advertising and media representations that tend to reinforce social conventions. “So they think, for example, that what makes someone female is having long hair and a dress,” says Paoletti. “They are so interested—and they are so adamant in their likes and dislikes.”

In recent years, however, gender-neutral clothing has staged a comeback, driven in part by evolving conceptions of gender more broadly, particularly among America’s youth. According to data cited by Time magazine, 51 percent of Gen Zers (typically identified as those born between 1997 and 2012) believe that there are more than two genders, compared with just 35 percent of millennials (born between 1981 and 1996). As the gender binary of male versus female gives way to more multifaceted understandings of gender, clothing preferences are shifting, too.

“Fashion mirrors the culture and political beliefs of a generation, which are often led by younger people,” Shawn Grain Carter, an expert on fashion business management at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, told CNN in 2021. “If traditional retailers like Nordstrom and Saks are to survive, they must reflect the value system of this generation to gain lifetime loyalty.”

The fashion world may have historically divided children into pink and blue, but in the world of real individuals, not all is black and white.

Jeanne Maglaty | Read More

Jeanne Maglaty was a copy editor at Smithsonian magazine.

Meilan Solly | | Read More

Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's senior associate digital editor, history.