On gender conditioning series - II - Boys like blue
I - Girls like pink
2025, yellow velvet dress, reinforced concrete, red pigment
L47 x D38 x H50 cm
Although pink was once a colour worn by men, the trend was slowly reversed from the end of the Middle Ages onwards, particularly following the Protestant Reformation, which introduced colours that were more dignified than others: black, grey, brown... and blue, which was increasingly associated with power, and therefore with men, for a simple reason: men were in power, and the pigments needed to make this colour were rare and expensive, so only the wealthiest could afford them.
As for red, which since Antiquity has symbolised masculinity par excellence (power, authority and war), it is becoming increasingly associated with love, and therefore with women. Until the 19th century, women who wore a beautiful dress often wore a red dress, and this was also the case in the farming world, where wedding dresses tended to be red.
It was also at this time that coloured clothing became more popular, with the development of colour chemistry. The blue versus red opposition was then transposed to children in softer shades: sky blue for boys, pink or pale red for girls.
"This fashion for pink for girls and blue for boys did not take hold until the very end of the 19th century, mainly in Anglo-Saxon countries and among the elite, particularly the bourgeoisie. It wasn't until the 1930s, with the development of marketing and the availability of clothes that could be washed many times and were accessible to the working classes, that this fashion began to spread throughout Europe."
Emmanuelle Berthiaud, historian, specialist in women's history
From the end of the Second World War onwards, marketing and advertising took over, but what really ‘fixed [the practice] in the mid-1980s was the possibility of knowing a baby's sex before birth. For most people, the ultrasound in the 20th week of pregnancy is the ultrasound of the baby's sex, as if that were something very important to know. One of the reasons it has become so popular in our consumer society is that now we know what clothes or toys to buy, and how to decorate the nursery’, explains historian Jo B. Paoletti, a specialist in gender issues.
The 1980s saw the explosion of gendered marketing at a time when capitalism was booming. According to historian Emmanuelle Berthiaud, toy retailers opted for a strategy: ‘Rather than having a red bike that would be passed down from big sister to little brother, there would be a blue bike for the little boy and a pink one for the little girl, which would sell more’.
These sculptures are therefore the story of the binary conditioning of our genders from childhood onwards, inherited from an unequal history of class and gender which, in a second phase, was hijacked by a financial logic, that of a globalising capitalism ingesting anything that might help its libidinous gluttony to fatten the capital of an ever smaller number of undesirables, regardless of any ethical question. Clearly, the interests of children were not at the forefront of advertisers' choices in the 80s and beyond. This is just one of many examples of capital shaping our lives according to its needs, conditioning our ways of thinking and imagining ourselves, perniciously, without our interests ever, or too rarely, coinciding with its own. We are, it seems, (all too often) passive modelling clay, and children all the more so, in the hands of a headless golem who still doesn't know where he's going or why, who still doesn't know that he's heading for his own demise from which we must, by all means, dissociate ourselves.Modelling clay, come to life and flee! Once freed from its embrace, the infinite possibilities open up to you!
The female sculpture is neat, upright, proud. She stands on her own, no pedestal, solid. And yet — she has no legs, no hands, stunted arms, and most of all, no head. The absence of a head speaks of the injunction to stay silent. She wears a dress (yellow, not pink — but still within the palette assigned to femininity). She is not sexualized, but she still embodies the demand to be elegant. She’s here to be beautiful, not to think. The strength is there, but locked inside a fixed, sanitized role — reduced to the hanger that holds the dress, or a mannequin in a shop window.
The male sculpture, by contrast, seems crushed, heavy. It’s dirty, misshapen, almost slumping. It has arms, legs, feet — the markers of action — but its posture betrays exhaustion, despite trying to look strong. The chest is puffed up, sweaty, the material spilling over — like a body straining to contain what’s expected of it. A red cap takes the place of a head: a stand-in for functional, utilitarian, masculine thinking. There is no beauty, no power — only mass. A body shaped to carry, to endure, to produce.
These bodies are formless, yet deeply coded. They’re made of modeling clay — but not lifeless. They speak of ambiguity, of constraint, of conflicting expectations. They speak of gender not as a natural identity, but as something we put on — too early, too tightly, always already tinted. Though faceless and fleshless, these two sculptures embody real bodies. They are the bodies our society begins shaping in childhood, with clothes, toys, seemingly harmless gestures, and supposedly neutral colors.
