Protesters in costumes outside the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement building on September 27 in Portland, Oregon. Photo / Getty Images
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 United States 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 armoured 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 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 organisation providing puff-up costumes to those protesting against the crackdown by US 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 organised 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 Handmaid’s Tale to protest against the curtailing of abortion rights in the US and beyond.
Of course, the handmaid protesters subverted an image of submissive femininity into something quietly menacing, while anti-Ice costumes inject gentleness and humour 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 anti-slavery 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 dehumanisation. Many of these folks worked as domestics or blue-collar labourers,” 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 signalling is: ‘This is a peaceful protest. We’re not here to dirty our clothes.’”
The ’60s-era Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee often dressed down and wore overalls, symbolising their solidarity with agricultural labourers in the American South, Square notes.
And the Black Panthers’ berets - a nod to the Cuban Revolution and Beat culture - paired with their sunglasses helped protect their identities to some extent while also establishing an immediately recognisable group aesthetic.
Instances of actual costumes being used in protest are fewer by comparison but similarly indelible in the public imagination.
LGBTQ+ rights groups such as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have worn exaggerated drag nun costumes to their demonstrations since the late 1970s. Aids activist group Act Up wore Santa Claus costumes to a 1991 gathering outside Macy’s in Manhattan to protest against its decision not to rehire Mark Woodley, who was HIV-positive, to play St Nick for the Christmas season.
“Clothing and costume is a way to sort of visually protest. It’s a way to use your body to signal your values and the intended tone of your resistance,” Square says.
The Portland inflatable costumes attempt to challenge the notion that the cities where Ice has been deployed are dangerous and in need of militarised policing. (Ice officials did not respond to a request for comment.)
They also serve a practical purpose: encouraging protesters to avoid any sudden movements or sneaky manoeuvres. “You can’t run. It looks stupid,” Brown adds, “and it stops people from doing stuff that would necessitate those behaviours.”
Matthew Gottula, a 36-year-old Portland resident who’s training to become a peer wellness specialist, confirms the costumes can be slightly immobilising, not to mention restrictive of peripheral vision.
“Have you seen those inflatable yard displays for Halloween and Christmas? It’s like being suspended inside one of those,” he laughs. He plans to wear his new frog costume to a local No Kings protest on October 18.
Lest we forget, this is Portland, a stronghold of the 1960s counter-culture movement that still prides itself on staying weird.
“There’s a sort of wry humour and a wackiness, and a desire to make whoever you’re protesting against look stupid for trying to impose authoritarian control,” says Claire Aubin, a historian and lecturer at Yale.
Aubin, who grew up in Portland and also hosts the history podcast This Guy Sucked, notes that in recent decades the city has prided itself on its theatrical but decidedly non-violent protest stunts.
They include the Wall of Mums demonstration in the wake of George Floyd’s death by police brutality in 2020; the memorably gross red, white and blue barf stunt that greeted President George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s; and the annual 10,000-strong Portland iteration of the World Naked Bike Ride.
An emergency Naked Bike Ride took place this week in Portland to bolster the anti-Ice protests. Hard to imagine a less threatening protester, Aubin muses, than such “a visibly not-armed cyclist”.
As footage continues to circulate of Ice agents standing by in riot gear while cuddly chickens and raccoons mill around in mild bemusement and dinosaurs twerk, Brown and Operation Inflation are expanding their services to Chicago and other cities.
“We’re drop-shipping costumes to there, to New York, to LA,” he says.
On Monday, video footage surfaced of a cow, a penguin, Cookie Monster and Winnie the Pooh gathered outside an Ice detention centre in the Chicago suburb of Broadview.
The images, after all, are vivid and immediate.
They transcend language barriers; they require virtually no explication at all.
Says Gottula: “We’re not giving this Administration the content that they’re looking for”.
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