Hats with ears. It seems obvious and yet so odd. I was dressing my little granddaughter to go out for a snow day, and it struck me how different her little chullo was from the neighbor girl’s pussyhat. These two different hats each held social demarcation, they were woven with political implication.
The chullo has long been identified with the Andes. It traditionally identifies the wearer by gender, ethnicity, community, and social status. Some argue it is as old as weaving in the Andes while others, such as Arturo jimenez Borja claim it was appropriated from the Spanish Birret. He claims. “We could say that its origin then is mestizo and that the main Andean addition were the earflaps.” Because of the difficulties of preservation of weavings, the main hats preserved in Peru were the square Huari / Tiwanaku hat, with its four corners and points.
Hats are an easily identifiable way to claim political association, as well. The pussyhat was created to “reappropriate the word ‘pussy’ in a positive way. It’s a pussyhat — one word. This is a project about women supporting women.” According to Jayna Zweiman. She and Krista Suh were the creators of the easily knitted pink square hats that created a stir in Washington at the women’s march in January, protesting against US President Donald Trump’s use of the word pussy in a statement of sexual assault and abuse.
Where the chullo is typically identified as a male hat, the pussyhat is very female, although many men wore them in support of the movement.
The chullo is traditionally woven by men, although commercial factories often weave them now, sometimes by a father for his son.
Women knitted the pussyhats and included messages for the women who marched on Washington. This gesture of creating for someone else also binds these two hats in a common thread. The hats were needed by the women who marched to keep them warm in the cold January weather. Chullos are worn by Andean workers to keep their heads warm in the cold of
