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Pretty in pink

The ultimately girlie shade was the power colour of 2010, showing up everywhere from red carpets to state dinners

Pretty in pink

Rebecca Cook/Reuters; Steve Granitz/WireImage/Getty Images; Danny Lawson/WPA Pool/Getty Images

In dark economic times, hemlines rise—a prospect that strikes terror in the hearts of women of a certain age who must, as a condition of continued employment, submit to being photographed wearing the latest fashions. So thank goodness for pink, one of this year’s standout colours, and mercifully available in dignified lengths. Pink has symbolic implications—girlish charm, an innocence regarding a string of box-office bombs—and looks good on just about everyone.

Little wonder, then, that it roared back from the nursery to fashion’s forefront, in hues ranging from blush to mauve to hey-are-you-sure-that’s-pink-because-it-looks-like-red-to-me. A mere dozen years after Gwyneth Paltrow’s ill-fitting pale pink number at the Oscars, the colour is again considered respectable, even on the world stage: both the Queen and Laureen Harper stepped out in it, and Michelle Obama wore pink so many different times and in so many different shades that it surely qualifies as her new favourite colour.

Pink has become, if not quite the new black, legitimate for evening wear as well as for casual Fridays. Capable of glamour yet decidedly proper, pink telegraphs, in perfectly ladylike tones, that the bloom is not off this particular rose. Not this year, anyway.

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