Is This Performative? Wearing our convictions on our sleeves

Every year I spend a few weeks in Naples, and every year the community marching bands gather on the street below my balcony to practise for the Easter processions. Last March, before they got to their usual repertoire, they played “Enola Gay” by OMD — an anti-war song from 1980. It turned out to be a quiet act of protest. That same day, the news was reporting that the word “gay” was being scrubbed from American government records, including references to the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.

A religious marching band in southern Italy, playing a 45-year-old pop song as resistance. Nobody told them to. Nobody was filming it for content. They just did it.

The red hat

I’ve been knitting a lot of the Melt the Ice hat recently. The pattern comes from Needle & Skein, a yarn shop in Minneapolis, and it’s based on Norwegian red hats — pointed, tasselled — that were worn during the Nazi occupation as a form of visible opposition. The Nazis eventually made them illegal, which tells you something about how well they were working.

All the money from the pattern goes to charities supporting immigrant communities in Minneapolis. That money is tangible and vital. But what interests me more is the other thing the hat does. It makes you visible. It puts your body in a public space wearing something that says: this is what I believe.

And it creates space for conversation. “I like your hat.” “Did you knit that?” “What’s the story?” Suddenly you’re explaining why you made it, where the money goes, what’s been happening. That is not nothing. That is how ideas spread between actual humans.

Suffragette colours

It reminded me of the first piece of antique clothing I ever bought — an Edwardian silk walking suit from about 1912, made by Frasers in Glasgow. Impeccably tailored, beautifully weighted, clearly bespoke. And embroidered in what now looks like grey and purple, but when you look at the inside, where the colour hasn’t faded, you can see it’s purple and green. Suffragette colours.

This outfit was worn hard — the underarms are in quite a state. Somebody wore this regularly, in public, as a statement.

At the time, you could buy suffragette jewellery, bags, ribbons, hatbands, buttons. There was a whole spectrum from high-end pieces with amethysts and peridots down to cheap accessories you could pin onto your own clothes. The point was to be seen. To show how many of you there were. To make the cause visible and countable.

This was not without risk. The suffragettes were opposed by the establishment, by many women, by the press. Wearing the colours meant nailing your beliefs to the mast in a way that could draw hostility.

They did it anyway.

The word “performative”

The Melt the Ice hat has been attacked on social media as being “performative.” I haven’t seen the comments myself — I left Twitter years ago and never joined Threads, which I’m grateful for — but I know they’re out there, and I suspect many of them are bots. They’re designed to make people hesitant, to erode confidence, to make you feel that whatever you’re doing isn’t enough.

“Performative” became a dismissal around 2020, part of cancel culture’s vocabulary. Before that, it had a very different meaning. Performance — the act of embodying something publicly — has always been central to protest. The marching band was performing their beliefs. The Norwegian hat-wearers were performing theirs. The suffragettes were giving a visible, physical performance of their values every time they walked out the door.

It comes from inside. It is brave. And there is nothing less “performative” — in the dismissive sense — than something you have to put genuine effort and skill into. Knitting a hat takes time. Knitting hats for your friends takes more time. That is commitment made physical.

I also wonder whether the hat gets this criticism specifically because it’s rooted in traditionally female craft. The suffragette clothes were dismissed as vanity and triviality too. There’s a pattern here.

The danger of silence

I read The Crooked Cross by Sally Carson at the end of last year — written in 1933, published in 1934, recently reprinted by Persephone Books. It follows the story of an engaged couple in Bavaria as the Nazi party rises to power. By New Year’s Eve, the man has lost his job. By the end of January, his apartment. We know the story.

What struck me so forcibly is that everyone in the book keeps quiet. There’s this belief that if nobody says anything, if you just stay out of the way, you’ll be safe. The father has misgivings but never voices them. The silence is the most frightening thing in the book.

Carson wrote it in real time, before the full horrors were known. That’s what makes it so powerful — and so urgent now.

Why being seen matters

The power of protest isn’t only rallies and donations and writing to your representatives. All of those are important. But it is also this: showing your views. Wearing them. Talking about them. Creating visible evidence that there are many of us who think this way.

When you speak about what you believe, you get more agency. You feel more intentional. It is a positive cycle. Visibility breeds courage breeds more visibility.

And there is nothing worse than the invisibility and silence of the people who could make a difference.

So if someone tells you that knitting a red hat is performative — good. That’s exactly what it is. A performance of your beliefs, made with your hands, worn on your body, sparking conversations wherever you go.

That has always been how change starts.

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