What hats and quilts say about the state of resistance in 2026

“In 2017, I made a ton of pussyhats,” Catherine Paul told me. “I just wore pink hats like there was no tomorrow.”

At the time, Paul appreciated “the way craft could be part of a demonstration of affiliation and belief,” the artist, writer and longtime knitter told me.

Soon the pussyhat became a symbol of something else: a brand of feminism in tune with the concerns of an underclass of middle class, mostly white American women, and no one else. By 2024, the hats, and the 2017 Women’s March in which many protesters wore them, had been holding as examples of ineffective protest. In addition to this, the hats came to be seen as cringe – not only exclusion, but also a kind of shame.

Then came Trump 2.0. In the face of an administration that its agents have kidnapped and deported children and shot more than a dozen people in a few months, Craftsmanship is back in focuswith knitting machines, quilters, nail artistsand more by getting renewed public attention for his political designs.

Paul, for example, has knitted red “Melt the ICE” hats.from a pattern sold by Minneapolis yarn shop Needle & Skein. Friends and acquaintances beg him for the hat, as they did almost 10 years ago.

Before I started reporting this story, I thought the rise of the knitted and padded protest under Trump 2.0 might be a sign of the left re-embracing itself—of a softening toward forms of political action once deemed uncool and annoying (and, not coincidentally, feminine). But speaking to artists and scholars about craftsmanship now, I thought that the explanation of its popularity is more complicated and simple.

“The news is so bad all the time, you can’t really find peace,” Needle & Skein owner Gilah Mashaal told me. “So what do you do? You find people and make things with those people. And since we’re artisans, that’s what we do.”

As thousands of ICE agents blew up Minneapolis earlier this year, “my regular knitters were all feeling a little desperate and unsure of what we could do,” Mashaal said. Employee Paul Neary had the idea to create a model inspired by Norwegian anti-Nazi hats called “nisselue”.

Almost published the pattern for the “Melt the ICE” hat. on the knitting website Ravelry in January, charging $5 per download, with all proceeds going to immigrant aid agencies. As Mashaal recalls, the Needle & Skein team thought, “maybe we’ll raise a couple of thousand dollars.”

But the pattern quickly climbed to the top of Ravelry’s most popular list, where it has remained ever since. People from 44 countries bought it, generating at least $720,000 for immigrant aid groups, Mashaal told me.

Meanwhile, in this year QuiltConbilled as the largest modern quilting event in the world, the anti-ICE quilts have attracted attention, bringing messages like“Our government kidnapped hundreds of people based on race while I was doing this.” Anti-ICE Quilts are also available on Redditwhere a user She recently shared a quilt reading, “Japanese American Families Remember: We Have Been Taken From Our Communities, Too.”

Even Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner recently posed for a Pod Save America interview that brings a Antifascist Knitting Club T-shirtalthough his recent social media activity does not make a particularly good ambassador for the cause.

Beyond the needle and thread, nail artists they show “FUCK ICE” manicure. And anti-ICE artwork is popping up on shirts, stickers and other everyday life accessories. When Nadia Brown’s students at Georgetown University open their textbooks, they see anti-ICE markers inside, the government professor told me.

The use of craft to send a message is far from new. Before the American Revolution, women in the American colonies boycotted British textiles and staged spinning wheels “in which they spun wool and linen thread to make a cloth called homespun,” Shirley Wajda, a curator and historian of material culture, told me in an email.

Story quilts — 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 stories,” artist and curator Carolyn Mazloomi told me.

Such art forms never left the American landscape—artists like Faith Ringgold brought history quilts, often with political and social themes, to the museum walls and the pages of beloved children’s books.

But political craft gained a new level of media attention — and notoriety — in the wake of Trump’s first election. The pictures of the 2017 Women’s March were a sea of ​​pinkas protesters wore knit hats in response to Donald Trump’s comments about catching women “for the pussy”. But the march soon became controversial—although the Washington, D.C., event boasted high-profile speakers who were women of color, most of the participants were white. Many women of color felt pushed out of the march and the larger movement that – kind of – grew up around it.

The organizer ShiShi Rose, for example, worked on the first march and wrote a very read Facebook post calling on white brands to pay attention to the experiences of Americans of color. In return, he received death threats, from which he said that the organization of the Women’s March did little to protect her.

Pink hats became, for some, a symbol of this exclusion, even their color and shape seemed to represent the white, cis anatomy of women (knitters have since said that the hats should be cat earsnot vulva).

When Trump was elected a second time, even some who marched with enthusiasm in 2017 he began to wonder if his efforts had been in vain. Meanwhile, concerns that began with women of color were appropriated first by liberal white men and then by conservatives, until questions about a movement’s racial inclusiveness became a kind of universal derision. As my colleague Constance Grady wrote: “Who wanted to be like those terrible women with pink hats? Everyone knew they were cringey and unfashionable, complaining about nothing.”

After all this, it was a surprise to see the return of knit hats. But for Brown, today’s anti-ICE arts and crafts don’t cringe in the same way. Unlike 10 years ago, “there is a very specific outrage around what’s happening now with ICE, and there are direct calls for policies that will make immigration more functional,” he said. The Women’s March was much less specific and targeted.

Additionally, anti-ICE art spans demographics. When it comes to stickers and other paraphernalia, “I see old people wearing them,” Brown said. “My college students bring them of every ethnicity, of every race. People are just outraged.”

In trying to represent the anger of all women in the country, the Women’s March was doomed, on some level, to fail. The resistance against ICE in 2026, however, is famous hyperlocaland craftivism is no exception.

Pussyhats was to “fight against and show our contempt for the man the country elected,” said Mashaal. With Melt the ICE hats, “we raise money to help our friends and neighbors.”

Proximity is emerging as a key value in resistance to ICE. “What authoritarian regimes want to do is make people suspicious of their neighbors,” Brown said. Crafting, by contrast, brings neighbors together on a common activity that helps them overcome their fears and suspicions: “Building community in a way that gets you out of your head and working with your hands is an effective tool.”

No protest is immune to criticism, and some have argued that Melt the ICE Hats are little more than performative virtue signaling, especially if people knit them without paying for the model.

“Yes, knitting a hat is performative,” said Mashaal. “But it’s also a way to show your anger, fear, frustration, rage, care.”

I started this story thinking that it was about the state of feminized forms of activism in 2026. I will end it thinking that many of the questions opened by the Women’s March – whether it is still possible to have a truly inclusive “women’s movement” in America, for example – have not yet been answered. Maybe now is not the time to answer them. Maybe now is the time for something smaller – the size, say, of a pair of knitting needles or a sewing machine.

In addition to his Melt the ICE hats, Paul recently finished a quilt that says, “Fuck it we ball.” “I wanted that persistence, a reminder of how craft can help us persist,” he told me.

Wajda, the historian and author, thinks about the coming spring. “Pussyhats and Melt the ICE hats have one thing in common: They’re winter clothes,” he told me. “Now I’m thinking about what a crafter would create for hot weather protests!”

Mazloomi, the artist and curator, has been working for the past few years on a series of quilts on African American history, with a focus on the civil rights era. “Stories have disappeared from the news, disappeared from museums and art centers, and I don’t want to see that happen,” he said.

Quilts remind people of “home and grandma,” Mazloomi said. “It’s a soft cushion for difficult stories.”