From Elle Woods To The World Cup, Who Owns Pink Now?

Blush was all over the spring 2026 runways (Bottega Veneta, Victoria Beckham, Stella McCartney, to name a few), with bursts of fuchsia at Alaïa and Chloé, and editors were calling it the season’s rising shade. But a runway is only one proposal and the many proposals for pink have been loud: last year's pink Pilates princess never really left, hyper-femininity carried into 2026 with #PinkGirly climbing on TikTok and #PinkLululemon turning into an archetype of its own, and #Pink now sits at 34.9 billion views with Barbiecore still going strong. It was all atmosphere, though. Pink was everywhere but not really about anything.

And pink wasn't only having a fashion moment. At the World Cup, the cleats are pink up and down the pitch, and StockX says its best-selling soccer colorways right now are pink. It reads as soft in one place and dominant in the other, and that split is a big part of why it's everywhere.

Then Prime Video's “Legally Blonde” prequel showed up, and the color finally had a person wearing it. “Elle” puts newcomer Lexi Minetree in more than seventy looks across eight episodes, most of them some shade of pink, styled the way people actually get dressed: Chanel and Valentino and a vintage Gucci backpack thrown in with Old Navy and Lilly Pulitzer. That's the thing a runway can't give you. On Elle Woods, pink isn't a trend anymore; it's a personality, optimistic and ambitious, and forever being underestimated, dressing accordingly.

The person most responsible for that dressed the first Elle more than twenty years ago. Sophie de Rakoff came back for the prequel alongside fellow costume designer Sara Byblow, opens in new tab, and the two of them worked backward from an ending they already knew, toward the girl Elle started out as. Before they touched a single garment, they spent two weeks just building the character: 1995 yearbooks, stacks of old Cosmopolitan, working out who a girl like Elle would have idolized, from Claudia Schiffer and Goldie Hawn to—once the show drops her into grunge-era Seattle—Gwen Stefani. In a city dressed in plaid and muted tones, a sea of gray to Elle's eye, her pink starts to look like a small act of defiance. Even the season's signature look, the hot-pink Sweet 16 dress, went through five sketches, rounds of custom-dyed fabric to land the exact shade. That's the kind of homework good costume design runs on, and de Rakoff is firm that it always served the character, not the nostalgia.

The merchandise, meanwhile, was ready before the credits rolled: a L'Agence capsule, a Victoria's Secret PINK collection, a Dove Pink Beauty Bar tie-in, a Shopbop edit, a L'Oréal Paris makeup deal, and a one-day-only "Elle World" pop-up in New York. What they share is the color and not much else. None of them reach for the specific ’90s the costume designers studied, or for anything particular to Elle; they reach for pink, because pink is the one part anyone can reproduce. It's the fashion-and-film flywheel Barbie made famous, and it spun easily because the runways had already supplied the color and the show had already supplied the character.

The collaborations are easy to see, and easy to rate: the capsules, the sponsorships, the pop-up. The harder work is what de Rakoff and Byblow did, studying a decade closely enough to build someone a color could actually belong to. Trends rarely come from nowhere; somebody makes them, one choice at a time. Any label can ride the wave by selling the pink it already makes. But a color is an easy thing to borrow. What actually lasts is the world it came from, and a collaboration only works when a brand pulls that whole universe inside its own, the way de Rakoff and Byblow pulled 1995 into Elle's closet. That is the hard part, and here it took two designers and weeks in the archive.