Anna Scholz Blog

Alice Dogruyol is in the June issue of Essentials magazine sporting Anna’s cotton jersey striped wrap dress in style. She’s wearing the dress in a photo which accompanies a charming story about how her mother and her best friend’s mother are also best friends.

Alice herself is a very talented writer who has covered Anna’s designs for the Daily Mail and more recently on her own fabulous blog, stylistplus.co.uk. She also works as head of PR and Communications for the luxury spa brand OCCO.

An upcoming issue of Turkish Vogue will also feature Alice’s writing, including a mention of Anna. We’ll keep you posted about that piece (it may require some translation).

The daughter of a Turkish father and an Irish mother, Alice spent her childhood all over the world. Her rich and varied experiences have influenced her “carpe diem” attitude toward life and her sense of adventure.

“My motto in life,” says Alice, “is ‘if you don’t ask you don’t get and if you don’t try you will never know,’ so I always ask and I always try and let the laws of the universe to do the rest.”

We definitely look forward to seeing what the universe has planned for Alice!

As you may have noticed, we recently updated our web shop to include a Shop By Size feature. Now you can tick your size and see all available styles in that size in either the new collection or the sale section.

This feature came about as a result of customer feedback on what would make your online shopping experience with Anna Scholz even better.

We’re always open to customer suggestions and comments, so feel free to send us an e-mail at info@annascholz.com or leave a comment on our blog with your ideas!

Ever wonder why pink is for girls and blue for boys? It wasn’t always so. In her new book, Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America, Jo B. Paoletti, an historian at the University of Maryland, explores the cultural shift away from gender-neutral children’s clothing.

For centuries, boys and girls in Western culture both wore little white cotton dresses because they were easy to bleach.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1884

Pastels came into vogue as baby colours after World War I, but up until World War II, Paoletti cites numerous popular culture sources which initially advocated pink for boys and blue for girls. However, by the 1940s, a collective decision and push on the part of manufacturers and retailers set the standard of pink for girls and blue for boys. It was really the Baby Boomers who were first raised in gender-specific clothing.

The women’s liberation movement of the mid-1960s created a bit of a backlash against pink for girls that lasted through the 70s; but, by the 1980s, gender-specific clothing was back in full swing. Paoletti attributes this to advances in antenatal testing that allowed expectant parents to know the sex of their unborn child, and to begin establishing his or her identity right away.

Gender-neutral children's clothing from the 196s and 70s

Another reason that girls have continued to be attached to pink and boys to blue, says Paoletti, is that children themselves have become active consumers. Children are the targets of pervasive advertising campaigns and imagery that tend to reinforce social convention. Kids absorb from an early age how “society” thinks a girl or a boy should look.

Paoletti feels that currently there is a rising demand for gender-neutral clothing for children and toddlers, that many parents would like their children to have more options for expressing themselves. The pink and blue divide is becoming less black and white.

Brother and sister, circa 1905

To read more about this book and see more photos, visit Smithsonian.com