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

“Back in 2017, I made a ton of pussy hats,” Catherine Paul told me. “I just knit pink hats like there was no tomorrow.”

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

Soon the pussy hat became a symbol of something else: a brand of feminism attuned to the concerns of a subset of middle-class, mostly white American women, and no one else. By 2024, the hats and the 2017 Women’s March where many protesters wore them were stopped as examples of ineffective protest. More than that, the hats are seen as cringe – not only exclusion, but also kind of embarrassing.

Then came Trump 2.0. In the face of an administration whose agents have kidnapped and deported children and more than a dozen people shot in a few months, craftsmanship is back in the spotlightwith knitters, quilters, nail artistsand more are gaining renewed public attention for their political designs.

For example, Paul has already knitted red “Melt the ICE” hatsfrom a pattern sold by Minneapolis yarn store Needle & Skein. Friends and acquaintances beg her for the head covering, just like they did almost 10 years ago.

Before I started reporting this story, I thought the rise of knitted and quilted protests under Trump 2.0 might be a sign of the left shrinking—of a softening toward forms of political action once considered uncool and irritating (and not coincidentally feminine). But in talking to artists and scholars about craftivism now, I’ve come to think that the explanation for its popularity is more complicated and simpler.

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

Bait thousands of ICE agents swarmed Minneapolis earlier this year, “my regular knitters were all kind of feeling desperate and unsure of what we could do,” Mashaal said. Employee Paul Neary had the idea to create a pattern inspired by Norwegian anti-Nazi hats called “niche lue”.

Almost placed the pattern for the “Melt the ICE” hat on knitting site 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 few thousand 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 bought it, generating at least $720,000 for immigrant aid groups, Mashaal told me.

Meanwhile at this year’s QuiltConbilled as the largest modern quilting event in the world, anti-ICE quilts attracted attention, messages like“Our government kidnapped hundreds of people based on race while I was doing it.” Anti-ICE quilts also inflate on Redditwhere one user recently shared a quilt reading, “Japanese-American Families Remember: We Too Were Taken From Our Communities.”

Even Maine senate candidate Graham Platner recently ran for a Pod Save America maintenance carries a Anti-Fascist Knitting Club T-Shirtalthough his recent social media activity doesn’t make him a particularly good ambassador for the cause.

Beyond the needle and thread, nail artists boasts “FOK ICE” manicures. And anti-ICE artwork appears on shirts, stickers and other paraphernalia of daily life. When Nadia Brown’s students at Georgetown University open their textbooks, she sees anti-ICE bookmarks inside, the government professor told me.

Using crafts to send a message is far from new. Before the American Revolution, women in the American colonies boycotted British textiles and staged bees “in which they spun wool and flax yarn to make cloth that was spun at home,” 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,” Carolyn Mazloomi, an artist and curator, told me.

Such art forms never left the American landscape – artists such as Faith Ringgold made story quilts, often with political and social themes, after the walls of museums and the pages of beloved children’s books.

But political craft has taken on a new level of media attention — and notoriety — in the wake of Trump’s first election. Photos from the 2017 Women’s March were a sea of ​​pinkas protesters donned headdresses knitted in response to Donald Trump’s comments about grabbing women “by the pussy”. But the march soon became controversial — although the Washington, DC, event boasted high-profile speakers who were women of color, most participants were white. Many women of color felt pushed out of the march and the larger movement that – sort of – grew up around it.

For example, organizer ShiShi Rose worked on the first march and wrote a widely read Facebook post calling on white would-be marchers to pay attention to the experiences of Americans of color. In return, she received death threats, from which she said the Women’s March organization did little to protect her.

The pink hats have become a symbol of this exclusion for some, even their color and shape seeming to represent white, cis women’s anatomy (knitters have since said the hats were supposed to look like cat earsnot vulvas).

When Trump was elected a second time, even some who marched enthusiastically in 2017 start to wonder if their efforts were 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 sort of commonplace vision. Bait my colleague Constance Grady you wrote, “who wanted to be like those horrible women with the pink hats? Everyone knew they were fussy and unfashionable, complaining about nothing.”

Given all this, it was a surprise to see the return of knitted headwear. But for Brown, today’s anti-ICE arts and crafts aren’t shrinking in the same way. Unlike 10 years ago, “there’s a very specific outrage about what’s happening with ICE now, and there are direct calls for policies that would make immigration more functional,” she said. The Women’s March was much less specific and targeted.

What’s more, anti-ICE art cuts across demographics. When it comes to stickers and other paraphernalia, “I see older people wearing them,” Brown said. “My college students are wearing them of every ethnicity, of every race. People are just outraged.”

In trying to represent the anger of all women nationwide, the Women’s March was, on some level, doomed to fail. However, the resistance to ICE in 2026 is famous hyperlocaland crafts are no exception.

Pussyhats is about “fighting against and showing our distaste for the man who elected the country,” Mashaal said. With Melt the ICE hats, “we raise money to help our friends and neighbors.”

Neighborliness emerges as a key value in the resistance to ICE. “What authoritarian regimes want to do is make people suspicious of their neighbors,” Brown said. Crafts, on the other hand, bring neighbors together over a shared activity that helps them get past 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 argued that the Melt the ICE hats are little more than performative virtue signaling, especially if people knit them without paying for the cartridge.

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

I started this story thinking it was about the state of feminized forms of activism in 2026. I end it with the thought that many of the questions opened up by the Women’s March—whether it’s even 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 knitting needles or a sewing machine.

In addition to her Melt the ICE hats, Paul recently completed a quilt that reads, “Fuck it our ball.” “I wanted that persistence, a reminder of the way craft can help us persevere,” she 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 wear,” she told me. “Now I’m thinking what an artist would create for hot weather demonstrations!”

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

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

This story was originally published in The High PointVox’s members-exclusive magazine. To access member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox member today.