[quote] How inflatable frog suits became the protest fashion statement of the year
Brooks Brown had a revelation this month when he watched federal agents pepper-spray an anti-ICE demonstrator who was dressed in an inflatable frog costume.
At protests Brown has seen and attended in the past, participants had come decked out in protective gear in preparation for tear gas or physical confrontations. Greeted by the even more armored law enforcement, “the feedback loop begins,” says Brown, a Portland, Oregon-based streamer for the philosophy YouTube channel Quarantine Collective.
Both sides looking prepared for aggression, in other words, can create a self-fulfilling prophecy or make it easier to fudge the details of who started what.
If an officer were to harass a peaceful protester in a wiener-dog costume or a unicorn suit, though, “It just makes the violence really kind of clear, who’s doing it,” Brown says. “Like, you’re trying to call the Insurrection Act on Barney the Dinosaur and SpongeBob?” So late last week, Brown and a few of his colleagues and friends created Operation Inflation, an organization providing puff-up costumes, like Thanksgiving Day parade balloons in miniature, to those protesting the crackdown by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In high-profile protest movements, imagery is everything. The world is watching - but, in our era of ever-shortening attention spans, maybe not listening or reading to get all the nuanced details. In the days since Operation Inflation began, protesters in huge, silly cartoon animal suits have been multiplying, adding to a long tradition of strategic costuming decisions in American political protests while giving it a new and whimsical twist.
In the 1970s and 1980s, anti-war protesters wore masks and costumes at various organized rallies, especially on college campuses such as American University, where a 1983 appearance by then-Interior Secretary James Watt generated memorable images of conservation-minded students dressed as rabbits.
Also in the early ’80s, students in New Zealand dressed as bunnies to object to education funding cuts and as clowns for demonstrations against their country’s hosting of the South African rugby union Springbok Tour during apartheid. At various points over the past decade, American women have worn costumes reminiscent of those on the Hulu show “The Handmaid’s Tale” to protest the curtailing of abortion rights in the United States and beyond.
Of course, the handmaid protesters subverted an image of submissive femininity into something quietly menacing, while anti-ICE costumes inject gentleness and humor into a tense, easily combustible situation. “It’s a way to de-escalate the tension by making it feel more like a performance,” says Jonathan Square, assistant professor of Black visual culture at the Parsons School of Design.
The abolitionist and civil rights movements employed a clothing strategy, too. The 19th-century antislavery activist Sojourner Truth, Square notes, “had a tendency to wear sort of simple, modest Quaker dress, which wasn’t necessarily the prevailing fashion during her era. But it was her way of saying, ‘I’m frugal and pious.’”
Civil rights demonstrators often wore formal and business attire - suits, gowns, dress shoes. “It was a way to convey dignity and humanity in the face of dehumanization. Many of these folks worked as domestics or blue-collar laborers,” Square says. “But when they protested, they wore their ‘Sunday best.’”
“When you wear an A-line skirt and kitten heels,” he adds, “what you’re also signaling is: ‘This is a peaceful protest. We’re not here to dirty our clothes.’”
