She's Too Pure to be Pink
Update: This article was featured on The Miss Hollywood Blog on 3/26/23! Link here: https://misshollywoodblog.com/f/she’s-too-pure-to-be-pink
In 1978 Grease premiered in theaters and the Pink Ladies forever linked the color pink with rebellion and sexuality. This was a departure from pink being thought of as “little girly” and innocent. Rizzo even scoffs at the idea of letting Sandy in the Pink Ladies because “she’s too pure to be Pink.” Twenty six years later in 2004 Mean Girls became one of the iconic teen movies of the early 2000s and the Plastics took their place as modern Pink Ladies, confidently strutting through the halls in their high heels and mini skirts and of course “on Wednesdays [they] wear pink.” So why are two of the iconic “popular girl” groups in cinema connected with the color pink? Because pink is often a symbol of femininity and in this case, confidence and sexual experience.
Pink is usually thought to be sweet and bashful, like the blush of a girl’s cheeks. But the Pink Ladies and Plastics are anything but innocent. They are supposed to be models of popularity, femininity, and sexual experience; everything a high school girl is supposed to want. Both films make a point of making pink sexy and rebellious for this reason. By making pink a “grown up” color they make it possible for the all female viewers to transition their love of pink as little girls in fluffy tutus to sexy women in tight clothes and lip stick.
One of the main reasons why the Pink Ladies wear pink is that they are meant to be unmistakably feminine in contrast to the masculine T-Birds in their black leather jackets. While the Plastics do not have a counterpart group of guys like this, they are still meant to be the typical popular “pretty girls” and dressing them in pink does the job to mark their characters as such.
In Grease Sandy is purposefully never dressed in pink, but rather pastels such as yellows, blues, and whites. This is meant to highlight her purity and notable difference from the candy colored Pink Ladies dressed in bold purples, polka dots, and of course their signature pink jackets. The head of the Pink Ladies, Rizzo is distinctly dressed in a bright coral sweater as she sneaks off to have sex with Kenickie. While Sandy intentionally does not wear pink during her final transition at the film’s end, she is accepted by the Pink Ladies at long last. By not wearing pink she is still holding on to her individuality, yet she is honorarily Pink in her black leather getup and bright red heels and lip stick (red being the more aggressive cousin of pink) as she drives Danny crazy across the fairground.
Cady in Mean Girls is the updated “Sandy,” a naive outsider taken in by the popular girls and thus undergoes a fashion transformation. Trading in her ill-fitting flannel shirts and jeans for hot pink heels, tiny skirts, and tank tops, she has her own “bad Sandy” moment. As she becomes more devious by hanging out with the Plastics and more sexually assertive with her love interest Aaron, she wears more and more pink. From the hot pink stripe down her black mini dress at her party (that she throws without her parents permission when they are out of town) to the pale pink mini skirt she wears when she and Regina fight in the street, her feminine side and therefore her confidence and sexuality emerge.
In short pink is sexy, girly, and above all bold. To be Pink is to be confident. While I disagree with Rizzo, there is no such thing as “too pure to be Pink,” because pink encompasses so many meanings none more so than self-assurance. And in the case of these two teen movie classics, pink is purely badass.
