“Back in 2017, I made a lot of pussy hats,” Catherine Paul told me. “I just knitted pink hats like there was no tomorrow.”
At the time, Paul appreciated “the way that craft can be part of a show of fellowship and faith,” the artist, writer, and longtime craftsman told me.
Pussyhat soon became a symbol of something else: a form of feminism that catered to the concerns of a small group of middle-class people, mostly white American women, and no one else. By 2024, hats, and the 2017 Women’s March where many protesters wore them, were wearing them. held up as examples of fruitless protests. Additionally, hats came to look like chechema – not only isolated, but also a kind of shame.
Then came Trump 2.0. In front of the administration that his agents have kidnapped and deported children and shoot more than a dozen people in a few months, trickery is back in the spotlighttogether knitters, quilters, nail artistsand more to gain new public attention for their political structures.
Paul, for example, has been knitting red “Melt the ICE caps”.from a pattern sold by Minneapolis yarn shop Needle & Skein. Friends and acquaintances are begging her for a headdress, as they did almost 10 years ago.
Before I started reporting this story, I thought the rise of spin protests under Trump 2.0 might be a sign of the left’s embrace — of softening the kinds of political action that were once considered ugly and offensive (and, not coincidentally, feminine). But in talking to artists and scholars about the trick right now, I’ve come to think the explanation for its popularity is both more complex and simpler.
“The news is so bad all the time, you can’t find peace,” Needle & Skein owner Gilah Mashaal told me. “So what do you do? You find people and you do things with those people. And since we are technicians, that’s what we do.”
Like thousands of ICE agents entered Minneapolis earlier this year, “my regular weavers were all feeling hopeless and unsure of what we could do,” Mashaal said. Employee Paul Neary had the idea to create a design inspired by Norwegian helmets against the Nazis called “nisselue.”
Almost published “Melt the ICE” hat design. on the knitting site Ravelry in January, charging $5 per download, with all proceeds going to immigrant charities. As Mashaal recalls, the Needle & Skein team thought, “Maybe we’ll raise thousands of dollars.”
But the pattern quickly shot to the top of Ravelry’s most popular list, where it has remained ever since. People from 44 countries have bought it, generating at least $720,000 for immigrant aid groups, Mashaal told me.
Meanwhile, in this year QuiltConbilled as the world’s largest modern mudslinging event, the icebreakers were impressive, with message like“Our government kidnapped hundreds of people based on race while I was doing this.” Anti-icing covers are also trending on Redditwhere one user recently shared a classic reading, “Japanese American families remember: We were taken from our communities too.”
Even Maine senatorial candidate Graham Platner recently sat for a Pod Save America interview wearing Anti-Fascist Club T-shirtthough his recent social media activity it doesn’t make him a particularly good ambassador for that reason.
Beyond needle and thread, nail artists they show the “FUCK ICE” machines. And anti-ICE artwork is being relegated to shirts, stickers and other paraphernalia of everyday life. When Nadia Brown’s students at Georgetown University open their textbooks, she sees anti-ICE bookmarks inside, a government professor told me.
Using hand gestures to send messages is far from new. In the lead up to the American Revolution, women in the American colonies boycotted British clothing and set up spinning bees “where they spun wool and linen yarn to make cloth called homespun,” Shirley Wajda, a curator and cultural historian of the property, told me in an email.
Storytelling – visual narratives sewn into fabric – have been popular in Black communities for generations. “During slavery, when African Americans weren’t allowed to learn to read and write, it was an easy way to tell a story,” Carolyn Mazloomi, an artist and curator, told me.
Such art never left the American landscape – artists like Faith Ringgold have brought fairy tales, often with political and social themes. museum walls and pages of beloved children’s books.
“Yes, knitting a hat is a good job. But it’s also a way to express your anger, fear, frustration, anger, care.”
– Gilah Mashaal, owner of Needle & Skein
But political art gained a new level of media attention — and notoriety — after Trump’s first election. Photos of the 2017 Women’s March were sea of pinkwhile protesters wore knitted headwear in response Donald Trump’s comments about grabbing women “by pussy.” But the march became controversial — although the event in Washington, DC, boasted high-profile speakers who were women of color, most of the attendees were white. Many women of color felt pushed out of the march by the larger movement that – sort of – grew around it.
Organizer ShiShi Rose, for example, worked on the first protest and wrote a really read the Facebook post A call for white would-be protesters to consider the experiences of Americans of color. In response, she received death threats, where she said the organization of the Women’s March did little to protect him.
Pink hats became, for some, a symbol of exclusion, even though their color and shape seemed to represent the white, cis female anatomy (some have argued that the hats were meant to look like). cat earsnot feminine).
When Trump was re-elected, even others who enthusiastically protested in 2017 he began to wonder if their efforts were in vain. At the same time, concerns that began with women of color were taken up first by liberal white men and then by conservatives, until questions about the movement’s racial inclusion became a form of all-purpose ridicule. Like my partner Constance Grady has written, “who wanted to be like those ugly women with pink hats? Everyone knew they were cringey and unfashionable, complaining about nothing.”
With all this in mind, it has been a surprise to see the return of knitted headwear. But for Brown, today’s anti-ICE art- and craft works are not the same in the same way. Unlike 10 years ago, “there’s a particular anger about what’s happening now with ICE, and there’s a direct call for policies that would make immigration more efficient,” he said. The Women’s March was not very specific and targeted.
Additionally, anti-ICE art involves a demographic. When it comes to stickers and other accessories, “I see older people wearing them,” Brown said. “My college students are wearing them of every race, of every color. People are angry.”
In trying to represent the anger of all women across the country, the Women’s March was doomed, to some extent, to fail. The opposition to ICE in 2026, however, is popular hyperlocaland cunning is no exception.
Pussyhats were about “fighting and showing our hatred for the person the country elected,” Mashaal said. With the Melt the ICE hat, “we’re raising money to help our friends and neighbors.”
Neighborhood is emerging as a key asset in the opposition to ICE. “What authoritarian governments want to do is make people suspicious of their neighbors,” Brown said. Design, by contrast, brings neighbors together on a common activity that helps them overcome their fears and doubts: “Building a community in a way that gets you out of your head and works with your hands is an effective tool.”
No protest is immune to opposition, and others have argued that Melt the ICE hats are more than functional symbols, especially if people put them together. without paying for the design.
“Yes, hatting is a good job,” Mashaal said. “But it’s also a way to express your anger, fear, frustration, anger, concern.”
I started this story thinking it was about the state of women’s activism in 2026. I’m ending it thinking that many of the questions raised by the Women’s March — whether it’s even possible to have a truly inclusive “women’s movement” in America, for example — remain unanswered. Maybe now is not the time to answer them. Maybe now is the time for something small – the size of, say, a pair of knitting needles or a sewing machine.
In addition to his Melt the ICE hats, Paul recently completed a scarf that reads, “Fuck it we ball.” “I wanted that persistence, a reminder of the way that art can help us move forward,” he told me.
Wajda, a historian and writer, thinks about the coming spring. “Pussyhats and Melt the ICE hats have one thing in common: They’re winter wear,” he told me. “Now I’m thinking about what a crafty person will create for a warm weather protest!”
Mazloomi, an artist and curator, has been working for the past several years on a series of series about African American history, focusing on the civil rights era. “Those stories have disappeared from the news, they’ve disappeared from museums and art centers, and I don’t want to see that happen,” he said.
Mud reminds people of “home and grandma,” Mazloomi said. “It’s a soft pillow for a hard story.”
