Stacie Moss, owner of Etsy shop Penguin Yarns, has been knitting pink-hued “pussy hats” for up to 10 hours each day for the past several days, stopping every couple of hours to ice her sore wrists and stretch her aching joints.
Moss is one of several Etsy owners who went into overdrive to meet high demand for the cat ear–shaped knit caps, a popular accoutrement among participants of the women’s marches that took place last weekend in protest of the inauguration of President Donald Trump.
Now three days after the marches — which took place in cities around the world and convened an estimated one million people in the U.S. alone — there are more than 60,000 Instagram posts tagged with #pussyhat or #pussyhatproject, and an Etsy search for the hats yields 1,262 results. The pussy hat phenomenon has demonstrated not just the power of Instagram to promote grassroots social movements, but also the ability of fashion to catalyze activism.
An Instagram post from Stacie Moss’s Etsy shop, Penguin Yarns
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A grassroots ‘handmade movement’
The Pussyhat Project was launched by Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman in Los Angeles shortly after the election, in an attempt to promote a symbol of solidarity. The hats were designed to make a statement against sexual assault, following the leaked tapes of Trump referencing grabbing women “by the pussy.”
Stefanie Kamerman, an early member of The Pussyhat Project, said social media and lesser known groups within online knitting communities such as Ravelry served as primary catalysts for spreading the word. As the movement grew, the organization launched a comprehensive site filled with knitting instructions and information on the marches. On its homepage, the group acknowledges the derogatory term for female genitalia, stating it was used “to reclaim the term as a means of empowerment.”
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A Ravelry user shares her pussy hat project
Kay Baxter, owner of Etsy shop Kay Crochet Patterns, said despite the empowering nature of the term, several customers struggled with using the word in email requests for the hats, opting instead for an asterisk or simply “p-word.” Baxter has received 120 requests in the past two days from cities around the U.S., as well as from users in Australia, Canada, England and New Zealand. She also offers men’s sizes, which she said have received significant interest.
Both Baxter and Moss said the hats have generated several first-time Etsy users and have been a significant boost to their businesses. Moss has generated more business this month alone than in the last six months of 2016, and Baxter said several stores in her community have completely sold out of pink yarn.
Baxter added that the pussy hats have evoked a nostalgia for handmade arts and crafts, and have helped raise awareness for sites like Etsy and Amazon Handmade. “I made one for myself and then I put it on my Facebook page, and people went crazy for it,” Baxter said. “Then everyone started to buy them.”
Fashion as activism
Fashion has long played a role in social movements — take the white dresses donned by members of the women’s suffrage movement during marches and demonstrations for voting rights in the early 1900s. Hillary Clinton herself made a nod to this when she appeared in an all-white pantsuit at the inauguration, and she made a similar statement when she wore a purple jacket during her concession speech as an ode to bipartisanship.
✊🏿✊🏾✊🏽✊🏼✊🏻 for migrant women and their children #whyimarch #womensmarch #suffragettewhite
A photo posted by Maria Echeverri (@misinga) on
A woman wears suffragette white to the Women’s March on Washington
“Any time you have an interwoven set of individuals in a broad movement, having unifying symbols can be a way of having a physical representation tying the group together and creating unity,” said Victoria Budson, executive director of the women and public policy program at Harvard Kennedy School. “Whenever there is a movement with as much energy and engagement as we saw over this past weekend, with hundreds of thousands marching in cities around the U.S., we’re likely to see physical symbols of that movement.”
Rachel Saunders, director of insights and strategy at the agency Cassandra, echoed Budson, and said social movements in the digital era have helped inspire a new demographic of young activists who use social media to showcase their activist fashions.
“The power of symbols has always played an important role in activism, one that’s been elevated in recent years with the rise of social media,” she said. “Since fashion is one of the most visible symbols there is, its role in young generations’ activism has reached new heights.”
The power of social media
According to data from Brandwatch, there were 49,000 mentions of pussy hat or The Pussyhat Project online. On January 21, the day of the marches, there were 22,000 mentions alone. While 79 percent of mentions were positive, Kellan Terry, analyst at Brandwatch, said the remaining 21 percent of negative comments were “attack-like in nature,” emphasizing the divisive nature of inauguration weekend.
A chart of pussy hat mentions by Brandwatch
Women comprised two-thirds of all unique mentions of the pussy hat or The Pussyhat Project.
“Social media provides a lot of fuel for grassroots campaigns,” said Kyle Wong, CEO of Pixlee. “It allows word of mouth marketing to scale. When you have people who are very passionate about a particular cause, you tend to get a lot of marketing on social media. It can be one of the most explosive channels for this type of marketing.”
Though women were behind the majority of hat purchases and comprised most of the participants in the global marches, Kamerman said that moving forward, The Pussyhat Project will likely offer new iterations of the hat that will test other colors focused on wider inclusivity.
“The pussy hat is here to stay,” she said. “We have more tricks up our sleeves. This is not the collective end.”
