It seems boys are wearing pink more and more but it used to just be associated with girls, how did this come to be?
According to the website "Gender Specific Colors," it would seem that assigning color to gender is mostly a 20th century trait. It would
also seem that at one time, the color associations were reversed when color first came into use as a gender identifier.
In fact, this reversal of what we consider "normal" was considered conventional, even in the early 20th century.
"At one point pink was considered more of a boy's color, (as a watered-down red, which is a fierce color) and blue was more for girls. The associate of pink with bold, dramatic red clearly affected
its use for boys. 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." [Ladies Home Journal, June, 1918]
According to Jo B. Paoletti and Carol Kregloh, "The Children's Department," in Claudia Brush Kidwell and Valerie Steele, ed., Men and Women: Dressing the Part, (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989). -
In the United States: "The current pink for girls and blue for boys wasn't uniform until the 1950's.
It would also seem that Nazi Germany had something to do with the association of pink with femininity:
"Catholic traditions in Germany and neighboring countries reverse the current color coding, because of the strong association of blue with
the Virgin Mary...the NAZIs in their concentration camps use a pink triangle to identify homosexuals. (The yellow star of David is the best known symbol, used of course to identify Jews. The German system
was quite complicated, using various symbols an colors to identify criminals, political prisinors, an a whole range of other groups). The
NAZI's choice of pink suggests that it by the 1930s was a color that in Germany had become associate with girls." - "Gender Specific Colors"
While there are also myths and legends supporting both or either color for gender identification, those resources dealing with straight history date the identification of pink with femininity to the period of World War II or later.