From Rebel, to Hipster and Normcore. On Mainstreaming and the Far-Right Politics of Fashion and Styles
摘要
The far right’s niche fashion industry is flourishing. Over the last three decades, far-right actors have discovered the language of fashion for their strategic purposes. As part of a cultural revolution from the right, fashion has been weaponized. Far-right symbols met with pop culture and fast fashion. Downplaying nationalist, racist, and authoritarian ideology through the means of the fashion system, since the millennium, far-right actors penetrate the mainstream. Far-right fashion capitalizes on the mainstream of minorities, a socioeconomic and aesthetic shift, in which global mass production employed the aesthetics of dissidence and rebellion. In this way, goods with anti-Semitic, racist, and nationalist coded symbols have entered mainstream German culture. This paper sheds light on the strategies far-right actors use to pursue “mainstreaming,” aiming to shift their ideologies from marginal positions in the public sphere to more central ones and to create “mainstream” appearances through fashion. First, it examines Thor Steinar (est. 2002), focusing on its aesthetic, economic, and political strategies as a pioneering far-right brand at the turn of the millennium. Then, it analyzes Tim Kellner (est. 2017), Phalanx Europa (est. 2013), Patria Laden (est. 2021), and Peripetie (est. 2019), as voices within the current generation of far-right fashion. Finally, this study examines the emergence of hatejacking and culture jamming, tactics through which far-right groups appropriate mainstream (fashion) brands to subtly disseminate their ideological messages.