Wear it loud, wear it proud: how marchers for Gaza are bringing ‘protest dressing’ up to date
It’s early afternoon at the latest national march for Gaza in central London. A man is wearing a sweatshirt bearing a photograph of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old girl who was killed in the Gaza conflict last year along with family members and the paramedics who tried to save her. He doesn’t want to be named. But it is, he says, his attempt “to keep her memory alive, until we get justice … Whether it takes one month, one year, 100 years, I’m not giving up. I’m not going to stop wearing this until the killers are behind bars.”
It’s a heart-rending example of a phenomenon common to all these marches over the past two years: people are here to call for an end to the war and the Israeli occupation, and many are using their clothes to bolster their message.
Far from being a frivolous afterthought, protest dressing has become an important part of these marches. Wearing the symbols and colours of solidarity can be an expression of grief and a call to action.
“Enough is enough,” says Mariama, who is in her 30s and works for the NHS in Nottingham. She is wearing a football-style shirt with a Palestinian flag in place of the club crest. Alongside it are the words “viva Palestina” and a visual representation of the contested area.
“It’s one way of giving voice to your opposition, my opposition, to the occupation of Palestine,” says the Rev Poppy Hughes, 65, of her Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) pin badge. Otherwise “there’s nothing to identify you as somebody who’s opposed to the occupation and the genocide and the starvation.”
There’s a sense of shared project about it. “You feel more united when you’re sharing the dress code,”... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2025/sep/19/wear-it-loud-wear-it-proud-how-marchers-for-gaza-are-bringing-protest-dressing-up-to-date