Woman’s March Attendee Hawks ‘Pink Crowns’ As ‘Pussyhat’ Alternative

WASHINGTON—Pink knitted caps with ears were omnipresent Saturday at the Women’s March on Washington, but not all attendees were fans of the so-called “pussyhats.”

Fawn Jordan, a fashion designer who lives in the D.C. Metro area, said she wished the most visible symbol of the march didn’t have anything to do with President Donald Trump. As an alternative, she sewed a number of animal print and bejeweled “pink crowns” that she was selling to attendees.

“My point is we’re all queens and we’re all the same,” Jordan told TPM.

“There are a lot of younger women here and I think some of them think that this is just a cute hat,” she said of the “pussyhat.” “They don’t realize it came from an insult from Trump.”

For Jordan, the phrase had echoes of Trump’s assertion, made famous by the leaked “Access Hollywood” tape, that his fame granted him permission to do anything he wanted to women, including “grab ’em by the pussy.”

“I don’t think the project’s website had any mention of that,” Jordan’s friend of 40 years, Melissa Hall, told TPM.

The “pussyhat project” was started Thanksgiving weekend as a national collaborative project intended to allow march attendees to “make a unique collective visual statement which will help us be better heard,” according to the project’s website. Supporters were encouraged to knit their own hats or sew them for other people if they themselves couldn’t make it to the march. While the site doesn’t mention Trump by name, the organizers said they “chose this loaded word for our project because we want to reclaim the term as a means of empowerment.”

“I get that people might think they’re reclaiming it,” Hall said. “But why not make your own symbol?”