Handmaid garb is the Guy Fawkes mask of 2019. Women dressed in red robes and blinkering white bonnets—the uniform of reproductive slavery in Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel turned Hulu show, The Handmaid's Tale—have become symbols of dissent across the internet and the world. The handmaids are ominous, silent, semi-faceless, and the most powerful protest costume since hacktivist collective Anonymous popularized wearing Fawkes' smirking face over a decade ago. And now, as Hulu's adaptation heads into its third season, they are everywhere.

The trend began two years ago in Texas, with a marketing stunt: Hulu hired scores of women to dress as handmaids and stand creepily motionless at SXSW to promote The Handmaid's Tale's premiere. Local reproductive rights activists at NARAL Pro-Choice Texas knew a meme when they saw one and ran to their local costume shop, dressing 12 women in red robes and sending them into the Texas Senate gallery to protest a bill restricting abortion access. When I spoke to the group's former executive director, Heather Busby, at the time, she admitted to always having social media shareability in mind, but I doubt she had any idea what she had started.

Handmaids have since attended pro-choice protests everywhere from Ireland to Argentina. They protested the Republican health care bill in Washington, DC. They loomed outside Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, nominally because he opposes abortion, but also because of the sexual assault allegations that surfaced during those hearings. In Croatia and California, handmaids have protested legislators who voted against measures to curb violence against women. In Poland and the UK, they protested the presence of President Donald Trump. When Alabama and Georgia lost reproductive rights, they gained angry, sign-waving handmaids. The Handmaid Coalition, a nonprofit with the tagline "Fight to keep fiction from becoming reality," offers aspiring handmaids organizing and costume construction advice. Everywhere the handmaids go, the media follows: Their image has become a staple of late-night set pieces, campaign emails, and, praise be, Twitter jokes.

Both Atwood and Alan Moore—creator of Anonymous' probable sartorial inspiration, the titular vigilante in V for Vendetta, who wears a Guy Fawkes mask—talk about their most memed characters the same way. People who sprang from their heads have now slipped from their control, taking on many, many lives of their own. Maybe that's why, beyond their eerie presence, internettiness, and tendency to show up en masse, Fawkes mask wearers and handmaids also share a certain ideological vagueness. The face of Guy Fawkes, who in life conspired to blow up Parliament, has always stood against the establishment. But in the hands of Anonymous and others, the establishment has been everyone from Scientology to Wall Street to dictators felled during the Arab Spring.

In Atwood's telling (and Hulu's adaptation of it), handmaids are forced to bear their master's children because the state of Gilead is in population crisis, but in the real world, women dressed as handmaids have been protesting situations far more diverse and often less concrete. The costume's flexibility is part of its power, but also keeps handmaids from being real drivers of discourse. Women dressed as handmaids suggest connections between our world and Gilead, but while that's important to consider and the purpose of Atwood's work, it's hardly solution-oriented. Handmaids embody gendered pain and dread so vast it's hard to put into words: sexual violence, physical violence, governments taking control of bodies, bodies valued over beings, being reduced to a womb alone. All they really say is "No to all that," albeit in a highly concise and memorable way. So they win no hearts or minds: Right-wing outlets like Fox News seem to think handmaids are mocking the institutions and people they're protesting, and expend considerable time mocking them in return.

Of course, twas ever thus. Protest fashion is more about communicating rejection and anxiety than creating tangible change on its own, and it's never popular with the olds. In most cases, like the Guy Fawkes masks or women protesters dressing up as witches or even just punks, the protesters arrive as what they hope will be seen as threatening and monstrous, their oppressors' worst nightmare. The handmaids are singular in that they've shown up as their own.

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