Identity and Printing: Badges, Banners and Clothing

Long before a printed t-shirt could say who you are, badges, sashes and banners were doing the same job. One of history's most effective examples happened in Britain — and it's a direct ancestor of the personalised, group-identity clothing we print every week.

The Colours That Built a Movement

In May 1908, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, business manager of the Women's Social and Political Union, chose three colours to give the suffragette movement a single, unmistakable visual identity: purple for dignity, white for purity, and green for hope. Launched publicly at the WSPU's Women's Sunday rally in Hyde Park on 21 June 1908, attended by an estimated 300,000 people, the colours spread rapidly onto sashes, badges, banners, scarves, and eventually a whole range of branded clothing sold through the WSPU's own shop.

A Movement You Could Wear

What made the WSPU's approach so effective wasn't just having colours — it was applying them consistently across every printed and worn object: tin badges, silk scarves embroidered with the tricolour, beaded jewellery, and the weekly newspaper Votes for Women, which explained the symbolism to new supporters. Women too poor to buy anything new tied strips of coloured fabric to their existing clothes. The result was a visually unified movement recognisable at a glance, decades before modern branding existed as a marketing discipline — arguably one of the first examples of a political campaign built on consistent visual identity.

Printed Identity Beyond Protest

The same instinct — using a printed or worn object to say who you are, what you belong to, or what you believe — shows up everywhere: national flags, football shirts, school uniforms, festival wristbands, and branded workwear all do the same job the WSPU's colours did. What's changed is the printing technology, not the underlying human need to make identity visible.

What Modern Printing Adds

DTG and DTF garment printing removed the last real barrier to this kind of identity expression: cost at small scale. Where a Victorian or Edwardian campaign needed to commission dyed fabric and hand-produced badges in bulk, a modern group can put a shared colour, name or symbol onto clothing for a single team, family or cause — no minimum order, full colour at no extra cost. The underlying idea is identical to 1908; only the economics have changed.

Where This Shows Up in What We Print

Group identity through clothing is most of what we do, in one form or another: sports team kit carries club colours and squad identity, hen, stag and wedding printing marks a group for one specific occasion, charity and fundraising shirts signal a shared cause, and school and university printing carries institutional and society identity. Different occasions, same underlying idea the WSPU understood in 1908.

Frequently asked questions

Why did the suffragettes choose purple, white and green?

Purple represented dignity, white represented purity, and green represented hope, a colour scheme chosen by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence in May 1908 and launched at the WSPU's Women's Sunday rally that June.

What printed items carried the suffragette colours?

Badges, sashes, banners, scarves, jewellery, and a wide range of clothing sold through the WSPU's own shop, alongside the weekly newspaper Votes for Women.

How does this connect to modern custom printing?

The same principle, using a printed or worn item to make identity or belonging visible, now applies to sports kit, school and society clothing, hen and stag groups, and charity fundraisers, made affordable at small scale by DTF and DTG printing.