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toongrrl-blog · 4 years ago

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Pink Power Rankings (Pt. 1)

Hi I am here to look at famous pink outfits in film and TV history and figure out: is pink a power color for this character? I choose to leave out obvious ones like Pink Power Ranger because, duh it’s in her name and this is gonna be a long list. Also avoiding real-life figures and onscreen depictions of real life figures because keeping it short (and I don’t have the time)

Pictured above are the bridesmaids at First Daughter Luci Baines Johnson’s wedding in the 1960s.

Mimi Tachikawa

She is the most obvious pick from Digimon and the girl most decked out in pink. To paraphrase this video from The Take: there was once a show about a strange world beyond our own, somehow a group of preteens were pulled into this world not of their accord, including a young 10 year old girl. Along with her friends they were exposed to the elements and fought monsters out to harm them, she was sexually harassed by two clearly adult digimon, uncomfortable with the elements, often had to put up with toxic masculine BS, and was often snarked at by the story and even some of her own friends for being so girly and into pink. Of course some audiences and the story were overcome with sympathy with this girl pulled away from a familiar world...

Just kidding! They weren’t and some audiences even gave her a lot of shit and this has only been recently examined. For a while Mimi Tachikawa had a problem that seemed to be well known by a lot of female characters, like Carmella Soprano, Betty and Megan Draper, Margaret Sterling, and yes Skyler White. Put a flawed, complicated woman character alongside more charismatic (and male) characters and she will be disliked (despite the audience being more likely to be she than the menfolk held up as icons).

This is sad because looking back, Mimi was truly a badass all along: she sticks up for herself, speaks up for herself, she is unapologetic about her love of pink and girly things, she is quick to tell guys when they are getting in her space, she’s honest, she lets Tanemon go on and fight with only a sincere question if she really is going to while the others hold their Digimon down, she stands up against the Numemon who were harassing her and her friends, and she was funny as hell. Sadly it took a long while for fans to grow up but many of us, especially girls, reclaimed her as our own. It also helped that Mimi came before girly icons like Elle Woods, Leslie Knope, and Joan Holloway and also before the boom in Gen X and Millennial women contributing to comedy and starting their own stand-up specials and movies and TV.

Power Ranking: 10, all because she held her own, no matter the haters and was glad to see us no matter how odd.

Karen Wheeler

Another complicated lady, this time older and from the 1980s. This is Karen Wheeler of Hawkins, Indiana whose children are off on their own adventure. She is trying to tap into her sexual power here. It’s dicey because the man in question is a young man and she is a unhappily married affluent housewife in the suburbs; she agrees to meet him at the motel for “private swimming lessons” and does herself up in a way inappropriate for swimming lessons (in Scarlet Letter Red to boot!), only to be stopped by the sight of her lazy husband sleeping on the Laz-E-Boy with their youngest child Holly on his chest. This season sees Karen open up to her two older children over the patriarchy and saying goodbye to a best friend and girlfriend after confessing his love for her.

Power Ranking: 6, because her sexual power was on shaky ground and only based on her looks and attention from a man but she shows some character development that season.

Nancy Wheeler

This look was a game changer, but Nancy is no stranger to pink and preppiness. Here she is wearing an outfit that recalls the postwar “Boyfriend Shirt” from Brooks Brothers for the female collegiate set and it’s updated with long loose but pinned hair and designer (or mock) jeans. In this outfit she goes monster hunting with her younger brother Mike’s best friend’s older brother and Nancy’s classmate, Jonathon Byers and squares off with slut-shaming police officers and a mother who chastises her for lying about her whereabouts and losing her virginity while Nancy’s best friend Barb Holland is missing and she also tells off boyfriend Steve for trying to cover his ass by not participating in the police investigation. This is the look (which can easily double as office wear) when you want to go straight from school where you have an impeccable GPA to monster hunting in your neck of the woods to find the whereabouts of your best friend and for fighting the patriarchy.

Power Ranking: 8, this is a girl on the move as we can see with her rolled up sleeves.

Eleven

The Iconic Look, the look where she made a boy wet his pants, found two missing kids, broke a bully’s arm. The Polly Flinders dress would alter the way we see girls in dainty pastel pink dresses.

Power Ranking: 10, can you do all that without touching someone?

Barb Holland

The most tragic look for this was the sweater that Barbara Holland (1967-1983) wore when she was taken by the Demogorgan and killed. This was the look where she was the recipient of a wet willie from a boy who looked down on her and her best friend who was dating his popular friend, the look where she accompanied her best friend reluctantly to the popular boy’s party, and where her friend turned her back on her concerns. This is the look of a passive and traditional (to her detriment) femininity. She did gain a huge following who cried foul over her fate.

Power Ranking: 4, points up for the fandom and devotion but she wasn’t empowered.

Erica Sinclair

That was depressing, let’s go to the girl who embodies America: Hawkins resident wise-ass, the girl who kept her observations and words as tight as her corn rows, and her planning as precise as her perfectly well done baby hairs (Black readers, feel free to correct me as I document her fabulousness), My Little Pony nerd and Economics wonk, and American Heroine. Erica sassed her way into Stranger Things with a raised eyebrow and a lusciously girly girl wardrobe that stands out and fits in with her Midwestern environment. She’s no stranger to pink and she commands attention and the best service at Scoops Ahoy and manages to get several ice cream dishes for free (the most elaborate ones) before getting in on finding the secret Soviet military base. Girlfriend manages to deal with teenage shenanigans, assassins, creatures from another world, near-death experiences, almost being captured by foreign enemies and the most awkward sing-a-long ever. She doesn’t seem to have lost her child-appropriate enthusiasm for games even when telling off old balding men for getting her age right.

Power Ranking: 10, you can’t spell America without Erica

Joan Holloway

Pink is an appropriate color for the resident femme intellectual of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, it shows that Joan is willing to defy “the rules” of fashion for redheads (she also wears red) and it ties into her 1950s persona of the bombshell who is trying to get married to a man who’d move her out to the upper-middle class suburbs and she wouldn’t have to work. That was Joan at the beginning: over time she started to own her natural independent streak and her willingness to buck expectations of her based on her gender and looks but also deals with the same men who ogle her, disrespecting her intellect, her hard work ethic, and even her body (fuck you Greg Harris). In this fuchsia number (still in the pink family), she sets up a luncheon with a colleague (Peggy Olson) where she pitches the idea of them setting up a production company with their names, while Peggy didn’t take, Joan starts her own “Holloway & Harris” with her babysitter and mother. Sealing her end as a strong, productive, independent woman who learned to own herself as she was.

Power Ranking: 10, men may like scarves but women like not being tethered to men.

Betty Draper Francis

Meet Elizabeth Hofstadt Francis and her ex-husband Don Draper (actually Dick Whitman), for about 10 years of marriage, they have enjoyed a union where they looked like a couple right out of a magazine, he being a square jawed handsome self-made man with an athletic build who often is compared to old-school movie stars like Tyrone Power or Clark Gable or Cary Grant and she, a beautiful model from a wealthy family in the Main Line area of Philadelphia who studied anthropology at Bryn Mawr and speaks fluent Italian and is often compared to Grace Kelly (and other Hitchcock Blondes). But the interior of their perfect colonial in the suburbs hid an ugly reality where she suffered from ennui and was a brat to her kids while he gaslighted and cheated on her with other women, more modern women, like she wasn’t enough. Eventually she found out his true identity and floored that she had been living a lie and gave up her last name for an imposter, she divorced him and married a man she met at her husband’s work function.

About three years later, Don is happily married with a younger and much more modern woman (Megan Draper) while Betty is married to a man who loves and accepts her even at her worst but to her chagrin has put on a lot of weight (a blow to a former model who grew up being raised that weight gain or being fat was the worst thing a woman could be) and she hasn’t dealt with her unhappiness in a productive manner.

For a while well into 1968, she accepted the extra pounds (although looking like she lost some) and coming middle-age and even dyed her hair black, until her new husband tells her he plans to run for office and as he was excitedly recounting what is to be done, says “Everyone will see you” not knowing that his young, vain wife would read this scenario differently and after assessing her new look to an old evening gown of her’s, she sped up her weight loss and returned to her slim and blonde look that turned heads. Soon she takes a drive to her son’s summer camp and runs into her ex-husband and they feel the old spark and sleep together; it is there she tells him that he as a lover is different than him as a husband and admits about the young wife she looked down on, “That Poor Girl, she doesn’t know that loving you is the worst thing to get to you”. Next morning she has breakfast with her new husband, who is none the wiser, while Don heads back to the city. But is Betty really happy?

Power Ranking: 7, not satisfied but has received some closure about her relationship with her ex-husband.

Sally Draper

This is Sally in her birthday party dress. On that day her father built her a pastel colored playhouse, Mother prepared treats for the adults and kids for her birthday party, she and her friends played out their parents’ (admittedly shitty) marriages at the playhouse, her father goes out to get her birthday cake from the bakery and returns only with a golden retriever named Polly, while her unhappy mother fumes about her husband doing something shitty and humiliating and not being allowed to ream him out because he brought a dog and that makes him the good guy.

Power Ranking: 5, she gets a dog but is still young and dependent on her messy parents.

Rachel Menken

Meet Rachel Menken Katz, running into her ex Don Draper while he is out with his latest mistress and she with her husband Tilden Katz. She would end this series as dying from cancer after having two young children and running her father’s department store and instead of flowers, requesting that donations be made for a Jewish hospital in the Jell-O Belt. In 1960 she fell in love with an ad man who proved to have been miserable and having lost his mother during his birth, as she did, she also competed in what was called “a man’s world” at a time when women were relegated to assistant roles at best and she split from him when he wants to run away with her, mostly because he wants to run away from his issues and not because of his feelings for her. As her sister Barbara said, “she had everything”.

Power Ranking: 8, she ends up dying young but she manages to “have it all”.

Megan Draper

Meet Megan Calvet, later to become Megan Draper. How does she become the next Mrs. Draper? At this timeline, Don Draper is dealing with life after divorcing Betty Draper (now Francis) and is trying (and failing) to quit alcohol and trying to date the intelligent, warm, no-nonsense, and close-to-his-age Dr. Faye Miller. But that night Megan, who noticed she caught her boss’s eye, decides to make the moves and in a uncharacteristically demure (many fans thought she looked frumpy here) but at worst basic outfit, she sleeps with him. This is the outfit for a quickie that later won his heart and has him pop the question and she becomes part of Creative at their work. But is this really for the best?

Power Ranking: 7, she married Don Draper but then again she married Don Draper.

Peggy Olson

Meet Peggy Olson, who officially walked away from the things holding her back from feeling at ease with herself and her choices. After a whole season where the priest impressed by her skills has learned that Peggy had a child out of wedlock and put him up for adoption and starts pressuring her to admit her “sin” while Peggy would rather move on with her life, she tells him they don’t see eye to eye and walks away from the Catholic Church and while the Cuban Missile Crisis is going on, she lays down in her bed with the pink comforter and pillows with her pink floral nightgown, she lays herself down to sleep and prays with a contented look on her face.

Power Ranking: 9, she’s not fully absolved of the issues plaguing her but refusing to wear a hairshirt and beat herself up? Awesome.

Dawn Chambers

Meet Dawn Chambers, from 1966-1968, she was the only black person (let alone black secretary) at the uber-white Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (pun intended for the decor) and like many minorities in positions occupied by less marginalized people, Dawn had to keep her head low and not stand out (despite some co-workers considering her as remarkable as a sore thumb). But then in 1968, she made the mistake of punching in for a co-worker and they get caught by Joan Holloway (and it’s so horrid, thank God Don Draper intervened on Dawn’s behalf and Pete reminds them of how the ad agencies are being looked at for their minority quotas). This was also the season where Dawn took to wearing blazers over her blouses and skirts or dresses and here Dawn is wearing a conservative grey blazer over a pink shirt with ruffles down the front and a red plaid skirt when her work life alters for the...better? It is there that Joan sternly gives her the promotion of keeper of the keys, title not pay, and Dawn tells her that she decided she doesn’t care whether other people in the office hate her but she doesn’t want to disappoint Joan, who withholds any warmth or approval. The next season we see Dawn stand up to a entitled and mediocre white man (Lou Avery) and first she is moved to reception and then she takes over Joan’s post as Office Manager (With her own office! And the salary!) while Joan goes upstairs to her own office in Accounts.

Power Ranking: 10, this is a big fucking deal for a Black Woman in a mostly-White corporate setting during the 1960s.

Trudy Campbell

1970, Trudy Vogel Campbell has remarried her estranged husband Pete and they are moving out to Wichita, Kansas with their young daughter Tammy where he will work a plush job for Lear Jet (and they are being flown out by them!).

For the past ten years, Trudy and Pete have had a difficult marriage where he was dissatisfied with the choices he made and that he really didn’t want to marry her, and Trudy had to deal with being a woman with fertility issues at a time when motherhood was seen as a primary goal for women and women who didn’t have kids or chose not to were seen as weird at best. They had to deal with pressure from her father to adopt, his parents snotty issues, she had to deal with her husband’s attitude, his envy of others, and his cheating. But Trudy laid her boundaries and was able to stand up to her husband, without losing her gracious manner and her zest for society. She tried to be a supportive wife and she found some common ground with him, when it comes to common decency and politics, and they make an amazing pair on the dance floor.

Then came the end after their divorce: they behave more amicably, he’s more involved with their young daughter, he fights for Trudy, and he gives an amazing pitch for her to come back. She takes him back but lets him know that she isn’t the same girl he married a decade before and she looks at things for how they are.

Plus she is gonna rule Wichita!

Power Ranking: 8, she accepts there will be compromises but states her boundaries and has them met and will be a society wife.

Elle Woods

Who shows up in court in LA hot sandals, a pink tote bag for her canine companion Bruiser, long glossy hair, and a curve-hugging but professional power dress in shocking pink? Elle Woods. After trying hard to be taken seriously by her fuckboi ex Warner and her snotty, neutral toned Harvard classmates and learning that her Professor got her in an internship for a important lawcase (where they defend her fellow Sorority Sister) just for her looks, she leans into both her natural intelligence, expertise, and love of pink and all things girly to defend her friend and solve the case.

Also can we talk about how both Legally Blonde and Bridget Jones’s Diary are both movies where the attractive blonde protagonist is humiliated by showing up for a costume party in a Playboy Bunny costume under false pretenses and she deals with sexual harassment and being underestimated regarding her intellect? But LB ages better because it kinda pokes fun at the beauty myth more and is more inter-sectional and Elle finds supportive women to add to her posse of supportive sisters and she supports other women in turn.

Power Ranking: 10, Sisterhood and owning your personality quirks and interests and boldly defending others is always a win. Case Dismissed.

Lorelei Lee

The ultimate Pink Power icon and the one who set the path for all femme-y and cute loving blonde protagonists with wit and ambition. This is the song for a woman who sings about how transactional heteronormative relationships in the mid-century were and how the performative actions of men in heterosexual relationships don’t do much to improve women’s lives, like paying the rent and that they would use women for their own uses and could be shallow enough to dump women if they lost their beauty and/or got older, so for insurance make sure you get money or rather things that can be hocked and worn with pride, like diamonds. Tom & Lorenzo covered this in their One Iconic Look series and this sequenced has been spoofed several times in Hey Arnold!, Crazy-Ex Girlfriend, Birds of Prey, and most famously by Madonna, and it is the look for women who not only feel good about their curves but also want to show them off. As T&Lo said about the ditzy Lorelai and her savvier friend Dorothy Malone (Jane Russell):

These women were all about power, control, and looking out for each other. Men were side stories or play things.

And in the repressive Fifties it was outrageously pink and smelt of female sexual power (pink pussies).

Power Ranking: 11, hawwwwwwww that’s what you get for having an iconic and referenced look!

Marge Simpson

The most nostalgically remembered outfit in cartoons and the most written about in think pieces and articles by Millennial women who grew up watching The Simpsons and the rest of what the Animation Renaissance had to offer. In “Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield”, the family goes out to the outlet mall in Ogdenville where Marge and Lisa happen upon a beautiful pink Chanel suit that even left my cartoon-apathetic mother enthusiastic and Marge is soon seen by a old high school friend who mistakes her for being wealthy and Marge goes along with the ruse and is invited to Country Club activities with the ladies where she shows up in several talented alterations of her suit (until getting destroyed by Santa’s Little Helper, RIP Iconic suit), she also gives her family a hard time about how they don’t fit into that Country Club Scene and then when forced to see how she hurt them (and even Baby Maggie), turns around and tells them she loves Homer’s sense of humor, Lisa’s compassion and outspoken human rights politics, and just loves Bart (even if she can’t figure what she likes about him).

This also happens to be another instance where Marge sacrifices a social life (she’s not seen with a lot of friends who have her back, aside from a brief time with Ruth Powers), chances for social mobility, and her own self-improvement for her family. While we love a mother who prioritizes her family’s autonomy, we still kind of hope that she didn’t have to sacrifice her own identity for her family.

Power Ranking: 8, points for the iconic suit and it’s layered meanings.

Bridget Jones

A rare move of power for a normally powerless and insecure woman and in a shocking pink blouse and black slacks that show off her hourglass curves and go with her coloring.

Pink is not a color Bridget isn’t familiar with, especially with this deleted scene that shows her in Pink Passivity (and it looks delicate on a blonde with blue eyes and pale skin but could risk her fading but I as a brunette would look popping!). But here after entering a relationship with Daniel Cleaver (who is a walking red flag) and finding out he was keeping her as his side-ho to his skinny, bitchy American girlfriend and colleague and I have my problems with Bridget Jones as a series (which would take several parts) and I can talk about how Peggy Olson and Joan Holloway were a lot better written versions of her (klutziness and awkwardness but succeeding!). But this is a huge power move where Bridget wears a simple outfit that owns her looks (even being affirmed by a older and previously antagonistic co-worker that she’s actually thinner than the average woman and she can’t back down, like ever) and is able to quit her job for a better and more glamorous job and tell off her ex-boyfriend for how poorly he has treated her. And all her co-workers smile off as she walks off in triumph after telling Daniel she’d rather wipe Saddam Hussein’s ass. I kinda wish I could go Joan Rivers on Daniel here.

Also points on that bolder shade of pink.

Power Ranking: 10, no one gets to burn a cheating, manipulative bridge like that (and yes she is conventionally prettier than I but that’s not the point).

Alice Macray

I know, I should shut my mouth and wear beige but my personal color analysis says I’m a winter person.

It’s an interesting power move, albeit within the confines of patriarchal society and even the only defiance that wouldn’t get her tsked at because she is serving the Male Gaze. And yet it’s a natural part of her characterization in this part of the series: the traditional housewife stubbornly keeping her pedestal and fighting to stall progress for other women pursuing other paths (part of wearing beige and shutting up as Mother of the Groom is to allow the Bride to take center stage) but it’s also a path she had to take what with being a dyslexic in a less informed and intolerant era and growing up in a sheltered, conservative Catholic family. This is also the outfit she wears when she spots a younger wife being forcibly yanked by her husband, alluding that the patriarchy isn’t benevolent.

This isn’t her first time in pink, or even a pink and blue combination: she wears pink when she goes and gives out bread to defeat the feminists at the Illinois Legislature, she wears pink and blue when Bella Abzug calls on her and her peers’ hypocrisy, she drinks a Pink Lady when she is given a “Christian Pill” and it matches her lavender dress. It’s also ironic: pink, white, and blue are the colors of the Transgender pride flag and she is defending White Heternormative Cisnormative Christian Values TM and it’s also a color combo that shows up in the beauty parlor she frequents where she and her friends wring their hands over working women gaining more ground and feeling that their comfortable privilege is being taken away by women who sully their hands working outside the home while they stay home with their children in their coordinated pastels and have maids of color keep their worlds nice and orderly.

But she is wearing a pink maxi dress with a high neckline and a very prominent hat that provides very ladylike shade for her fair skin, just like our first Pink Power Girl Mimi Tachikawa, and like Mimi, Alice will take a life-altering short trip to Wonderland. And like Pink Power Girl Eleven, she finds her true hidden power and starts wearing more saturated colors as time goes on.

Power Ranking: 5, she is on her way to breaking out of her little safe world and doing more than subverting a wedding tradition.

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