An Ode to Pink: The French Way to Wear It Without Looking Sugary
Eugénie Trochu is a Who What Wear editor in residence known for her transformative work at Vogue France and her Substack newsletter, where she documents and shares new trends, her no-nonsense approach to fashion and style, plus other musings. She's also working on her upcoming first book that explores fashion as a space of memory, projection, and reinvention.
My daughter is 2 and swears by pink. Pink dress. Pink socks. Pink sweater. More pink. Pink as an obvious choice—a refuge color, joyful, reassuring, almost militant at that age. I thought, though, that I wasn’t a pink mom. That given my passion for black, she’d turn out more goth girl than pink lady. But never underestimate the power of little girls.
And then, opening my closet this morning, I had to face the truth: There was pink everywhere. Pink I didn’t call pink. Pink I justified with other names. Dusty pink. Powder pink. “Almost beige” pink. In short: pink—but adult. Thought-through. Domesticated.
That’s when it hit me: The problem was never pink. The problem is how we wear it.
Why Pink Scares Us
Pink carries heavy symbolic baggage. It conjures childhood, enforced softness, decorative femininity. Something pretty rather than strong. The well-behaved little girl rather than the free woman. The result? Either we embrace it in full cliché mode (tulle, ruffles, cotton candy), or we ban it entirely from our adult wardrobes. Somewhere in between, we forget there are a thousand shades, a thousand uses, a thousand ways to make it interesting.
How to Wear Pink Without Looking Sugary
First, it’s a question of quality. Pink forgives nothing. One beautiful piece is enough. A Courrèges vinyl jacket, for instance: sharp cut, structured fabric, a bold pink. Same goes for a well-cut pink sweater. Then, always twist it with calmer colors: beige, ecru, gray, denim—or add a pop, but discreetly (a green T-shirt under a blush pink sweater, for example). Pink loves to be tempered… or to temper. I also love mixing it with very casual pieces: jeans, sneakers, a straight coat. Never too polished.
And then there are my personal indulgences: the total-pink ski look (almost conceptual and deeply joyful), and sometimes pink taken at face value in the evening, on a dress. No more apologies there; you commit, you brighten things up, you pair it with something sexier, and pink becomes genuinely desirable.
At the end of the day, pink isn’t silly. It’s just sensitive. Chosen badly, it shouts. Worn well, it resonates beautifully. Pink only turns sugary when we ask it to be cute. Leave it alone, give it a good cut, a fabric with substance, a touch of irony—and it becomes seriously cool.
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