How We Learned to Make Our Dissent Visible: A Material History of Protest Banners
Ian Danger Capstick
In 1908, Mary Lowndes stood in her Chelsea studio surrounded by silk, thread, and 79 other women. They had six months to create 80 banners for the biggest suffrage procession London had ever seen. Lowndes, a stained-glass artist who'd spent years bent over church windows, understood something fundamental: if you wanted people to see your message, you had to make it beautiful enough to stop them in their tracks.
"A banner is a thing to float in the wind, to flicker in the breeze, to flirt its colours for your pleasure," she wrote in a pamphlet distributed to suffrage workshops. Not a sign. Not just words on fabric. An object created lead the parade, mark your place among others. One way to say: this is where we stand, and what we stand for.
The women in her Artists' Suffrage League workshops weren't seamstresses by trade. They were teachers, clerks, daughters of MPs who'd been denied the vote. But under Lowndes' instruction, they mastered split stitch and underside couching, techniques medieval embroiderers had used to secure gold thread for bishops' robes. Each banner took weeks. Purple silk for loyalty. White for purity. Green for hope. When they marched that June day, those banners transformed London's streets into what one observer called "a river of color demanding justice."
This is a story about how humans learned to make dissent visible, told through the materials and methods that turned private rage into public record.
From Roman military standards to Black Lives Matter vinyl, every protest banner carries within its fibers the DNA of all that came before.
The Roman Banner That Started Everything
Picture a Roman soldier in 3rd century Egypt, carefully painting the goddess Victoria on a piece of linen. He's creating a vexillum, a military standard that would hang from a crossbar like a flag turned sideways. When he's done, he'll attach it to a pole, creating a T-shaped banner that identifies his unit in battle.
That soldier couldn't know his design would outlast the Empire. But the sole surviving vexillum, now in Moscow's Pushkin Museum, reveals the template every protest banner would follow: portable, visible, symbolic. Make your message. Raise it high. March.
The vexillum wasn't fancy—just 47 by 50 centimeters of linen with mineral pigments. But it worked. You could spot your unit across a battlefield. You could rally behind it. You could carry it for miles.
Every "Save Our NHS" banner, every "Water Is Life" sign, every hand-painted "Black Lives Matter" placard descends from this simple innovation: identity made portable.
When Guilds Controlled the Colors
Jump forward a thousand years. It's 1188 in London, and if you want to dye fabric, you better know someone in the guild. The dyers' guilds controlled every aspect of color production like a medieval monopoly. Want red? You need madder root, alum mordant, and weeks of work. Blue? That's woad, fermented in vats that stank so badly they were banned from city centers.
Making a banner in medieval London meant navigating an entire economy of specialists. First, the weaver created your base fabric—wool for durability, silk if you had money, linen for everyday use. Then to the dyer, who'd learned their recipes as closely guarded secrets. Medieval dyers knew that brazilwood gave a red that faded in sunlight, while madder root produced a red that lasted centuries. They knew which mordants made colors bleed and which made them bind to fiber permanently.
The actual banner construction? That belonged to the embroiderers, and by 1200, England had developed something special. Opus Anglicanum—"English work"—became so renowned that popes commissioned it. The technique sounds obsessive because it was: split stitch created modeling so fine it looked painted, underside couching secured gold thread by stitching it down from behind, leaving the precious metal unmarred on the surface.
A small badge might take 35 hours. A processional banner? Months of labor by multiple hands. The Butler-Bowden Cope at the Victoria and Albert Museum shows what this looked like at its peak: saints' faces so detailed you can see individual eyelashes, all worked in silk thread finer than human hair.
The vibrant world of medieval banner-making extended far beyond embroidery and weaving. As textile historian Mark Clarke reveals in the Haptic & Hue podcast episode "The Forgotten Medieval Craft of Cloth Staining," cloth stainers created the visual backdrop for medieval life using water-based paints and stamps.
The Gloucester Manuscript, transcribed by monks in the 1390s, contains 30 recipes for these stains—including one calling for brazilwood powder boiled in fresh urine to create a deep scarlet red. Unlike tapestries that took months to complete, stained cloths could be knocked out in days, painted on floors covered with rushes, using thorns as pins. "People would've had them for curtains to hang over the door," Clarke explains. "Enormous amounts, there would've been acres of this stuff." When kings visited or important figures died, stainers worked around the clock producing banners, tabards, and theatrical scenery.
"People would've had them for curtains to hang over the door," Clarke explains. "Enormous amounts, there would've been acres of this stuff."
This forgotten craft reveals that medieval protest and processional banners weren't limited to precious embroidery—they were often quickly painted using recipes that might combine oak gall ink with red to make purple, or layer translucent glazes over gold leaf for extra shimmer. The stainers' work democratized visual display, bringing color to "the poorest home, to the grandest palace."
The Factory That Changed Everything
George Tutill understood something about the future. When he opened his banner-making workshop in 1837, British workers were organizing like never before. Trade unions, temperance societies, burial clubs—they all wanted banners. Beautiful ones. Ones that would last.
By 1889, Tutill's factory at 83 City Road in London had become the Amazon of banner-making. One banner per day, minimum. Seventy-five percent of the British trade union market. He achieved this dominance through two innovations that sound simple until you try them.
First, in 1861, he patented a method for treating silk with rubber solution and linseed oil. Suddenly, a banner could survive British rain. Union members who'd watched their prized banners dissolve in a single procession could now march in any weather.
Second, Tutill claimed to own the world's largest Jacquard loom. While competitors hand-painted designs, he could weave complex images directly into silk. A portrait of Marx? The logo of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers? Tutill's loom could produce it faster and more durably than any painter.
The economics mattered. Trade union banners weren't cheap—a large one cost several months' wages for a typical worker. Unions saved for years, held fundraisers, took up collections. When the banner arrived, they held dedication ceremonies like ship christenings. These weren't just signs; they were investments in identity.
Chemistry Meets Resistance
Mary Lowndes grasped these possibilities immediately. When she founded the Artists' Suffrage League in 1907, she didn't just organize banner-making—she revolutionized it. Working from her Chelsea studio, she transformed suffrage banners from painted slogans into art objects.
For that massive June 1908 procession, Lowndes coordinated 80 women to produce 70-80 banners. Each incorporated sophisticated design principles: heraldic imagery, symbolic colors, regional variations. The Hammersmith banner featured local landmarks. The Writers' Suffrage League showed a woman breaking free from chains made of books.
Meanwhile, the more radical Suffrage Atelier, founded in 1909, took a different approach. Forget embroidery—they pioneered block-printing techniques that any woman could learn in an afternoon. Their Tuesday night classes in Hampstead taught banner-making as political action. Come for the resistance, stay for the skills.
"Women gathered in homes and studios, sharing techniques while building solidarity networks," one participant recalled. The physical act of making became inseparable from the political act of protesting. When you'd spent weeks stitching "Deeds Not Words," you showed up to march.
Screen Printing Democratizes Dissent
May 1970. The smell of photo emulsion fills a Berkeley basement. Students who'd occupied campus buildings months earlier now occupy screen printing workshops, cranking out posters against the invasion of Cambodia.
The technology wasn't new—screen printing had existed for decades. But the Berkeley Political Poster Workshop, inspired by Paris '68 and the Atelier Populaire, understood its revolutionary potential. Create a stencil using light-sensitive chemicals. Expose it. Wash out the unhardened emulsion. Pull ink across the screen with a squeegee. Repeat.
One person could produce hundreds of posters in a day. The same image could appear simultaneously on walls from Oakland to Ann Arbor. No need for Tutill's factory or Lowndes' months of embroidery. Just screens, squeegees, and rage.
Materials evolved alongside methods. Cotton duck gave way to ripstop nylon—lighter, stronger, cheaper. Acrylic paints, invented in the 1940s, dried in hours instead of days. You could make a banner after work and march with it that evening.
Gilbert Baker understood this when he designed the Pride flag in 1978. The original version had eight stripes, each with specific meaning: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, violet for spirit. But when he tried to mass-produce after that first 30-by-60-foot hand-dyed flag, reality hit. Hot pink fabric was too expensive. Turquoise too rare. The flag dropped to six stripes.
This is the hidden history of protest: vision meeting material reality.
Baker and 30 volunteers had hand-dyed that first flag in the attic of San Francisco's Gay Community Center. Lynn Segerblom (Faerie Argyle Rainbow) developed the dye techniques. They hauled it to the parade in garbage bags, raised it at United Nations Plaza, and watched it transform sunshine into symbol.
The Economics of Collective Creation
Banner-making has always been expensive. Gilbert Baker's original Pride flag tells that story perfectly. He designed eight stripes—hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, violet for spirit. But when he went to mass-produce them after that first 30-by-60-foot hand-dyed flag, reality hit. Hot pink fabric was too expensive. Turquoise too rare. The flag dropped to six stripes out of economic necessity.
This is how movements actually work.
You start with vision, then figure out what's possible.
Today's screen printing requires $50-200 per screen just for setup. Digital printing skips setup fees but costs more per banner. Vinyl needs grommets every 18-24 inches or it tears in the wind. Indoor fabric can be light (3.5 oz), but outdoor protest needs heavy duty (9 oz minimum). These costs are barriers that communities have to solve together.
The genius move? Aram Han Sifuentes's Protest Banner Lending Library, launched in 2016. Public libraries loan out professionally-made banners like books. Can't afford $200 for a custom banner? Check one out. Return it when you're done. Someone else uses it next week.
In Hong Kong, protesters developed mesh banner techniques specifically for typhoon conditions—70-30 weave lets wind through while keeping messages readable. Chilean arpilleristas pass down appliqué methods mother to daughter, using flour-and-water paste when commercial glue runs out. Black Lives Matter organizers share Google Drives full of downloadable designs, turning any home printer into a protest supply center.
The technical knowledge matters. But what matters more is how it spreads. Every movement develops its own material culture based on what's available, what's affordable, and who shows up to help. The specs—those grommets and fabric weights and screen costs—only make sense inside these networks of mutual aid.
The Human Touch
Walk into any print shop today and you'll find wide-format printers spitting out banners on demand. Upload your file, pick your material, come back tomorrow. A basic vinyl banner runs $20-50. UV-resistant inks. Grommets included.
So why do people still make banners by hand?
"There's something about a hand-painted banner that a printed one can't replicate," explains one contemporary maker who runs workshops in church basements. You see the drips. The places where someone pressed too hard with the brush. The corner where they ran out of one color and mixed another. These imperfections announce: a human being cared enough to spend hours on this.
During Chile's Pinochet years, women created arpilleras—patchwork pictures documenting disappeared family members. They used old clothes, flour sack backing, whatever they could find. These were testimonies, smuggled out of the country sewn into the backs of wall hangings sold to tourists.
"The arpilleras allowed us to tell the world what was happening when no one would listen," one maker recalled. Each stitch carried risk. Military police could arrest you for owning scraps of fabric in the wrong configuration.
Contemporary movements blend all these traditions. Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement deployed LED screens alongside calligraphy banners. Standing Rock water protectors hung traditional star quilts next to vinyl environmental justice banners. The Women's March of 2017 saw everything from professional union banners to cardboard signs made that morning on kitchen tables.
Where We're Heading
Robin Bell stands on a Washington DC sidewalk, adjusting a 12,000-lumen projector. Minutes later, "EMOLUMENTS WELCOME" blazes across Trump International Hotel. No permit needed. No banner to confiscate. Just light and dissent.
Meanwhile, environmental consciousness drives material innovation. Go Green Banners prints on 100% post-consumer recycled polyester with water-based inks. Hemp fabric banners biodegrade completely. Mushroom-based adhesives replace petroleum products. The question isn't just "how do we make our message visible?" but "how do we do it without destroying what we're trying to save?"
"When miners see a hand-painted banner, they see the labor," Hall says. "They understand what went into it because they understand what goes into their own work."
The Thread That Connects Us
That Roman soldier painting Victoria on linen couldn't imagine Black Lives Matter protesters projecting names of the dead onto courthouse walls. Medieval embroiderers threading gold through silk didn't foresee Chilean women stitching testimonies of torture into fabric scraps. Mary Lowndes coordinating her suffrage banner workshop couldn't predict teenagers in Hong Kong using mesh mathematics to keep their demands visible in typhoons.
But they're all part of the same story. The human need to be seen. To have our dissent witnessed. To transform private conviction into public declaration.
Every banner-making workshop—whether it's teaching medieval goldwork or showing activists how to use a squeegee—passes down more than technique. They transmit the knowledge that your hands can create something that changes how others see the world. That thread and fabric and ink aren't just materials but weapons in what South African artists called "the weapon of theory".
Two thousand years separate that Roman vexillum from today's protests. The materials evolved—linen to silk to vinyl to light itself. The methods transformed—hand painting to mechanized weaving to screen printing to digital projection. But the essential act remains unchanged.
Take your truth. Give it form. Lift it high. March.
The goddess Victoria on that ancient banner holds a wreath, ready to crown the victor. Every banner since asks the same question: who deserves victory? Who gets seen? Who gets remembered? The answer comes not from the powerful but from those who gather in workshops and basements, sharing skills and materials, building movements one stitch at a time.
Who deserves victory? Who gets seen? Who gets remembered?
That's the real lesson of banner history. Not the evolution of technique but the persistence of resistance. As long as humans have something to say and others try to silence them, we'll find ways to make our voices visible. With gold thread or house paint, silk or recycled plastic, in stitches or pixels—we make banners because we must be seen.
The next time you see protesters unfurling their demands, look closer. See the hours in every painted letter, the meetings behind every design choice, the history in every raised fist holding a pole.
That banner didn't just appear. Someone made it. Someone who understands what Mary Lowndes knew in 1908: beauty and resistance are the same thing, if you do them right.
