“It’s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing,” Jo B. Paoletti, the author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys From the Girls in America, told Smithsonian magazine in 2011.

Reed had to make a run to Hobby Lobby. She needed a few materials, including a haul of baby blue aran yarn, so she could start crocheting a sweater for a guy with a 6-foot, 10-inch wingspan.