Fashion and the Far Right: The New Complexity in Style

This in-depth fashion studies research investigates the current role of fashion for the far right in Europe and the US. Since the millennium, on both sides of the Atlantic, an international far right has appropriated the language of fashion (Barthes [1967] 2006) for its strategic purposes. In the course of this, according to our diagnosis of the times, fashion has been weaponized. Fashion plays an essential role in forming and expanding national, transnational, and transatlantic networks of the far right. Contemporary far-right fashion aesthetics are characterized by polysemy and opaqueness, termed here, a new complexity in style (Gaugele 2019; Gaugele/Held 2021, in reference to Habermas 1985). Starting from case studies on far-right German/Austrian fashion brands and U.S. labels, the researchers aim to identify this new complexity in style and the role fashion plays in the transnational increase of far-right ideologies, violence, and affects. How are power, cultural violence, aggression, and hate created through far-right fashion? What role do categories of gender, sex, race, body, ability, and class play in this process? Which political and economic networks can be identified through far-right fashion? Which signs and symbols can be discovered? To examine these questions the research team collects data through local and online fieldwork as well as archival research in Germany, the US, and throughout Europe. Therefore, the study applies the feminist materialist research method of situational analysis (Clarke 2005). With it, the investigators develop a forward- thinking, future-oriented level of fashion research that at the same time outlines democratic (counter)knowledge and civil society practices in fashion. The scholars advance purely analytical research through knowledge and practices of democratic (counter)action, as anti-hatejacking or fashion hacking in order to reduce racism, hate and rising polarization. The projects dissemination strategies on the one side addresses the academic community for advancing research through meetings of experts, workshops, symposiums, peer-reviewed publications. On the other side, it will inform the wider public through a series of podcasts. A project website will publish the interim results via open-access research papers. The research team from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna collaborates internationally with the American Universitys Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at the Center for University Excellence in Washington D.C. It will be supported further by an international advisory board of five renowned experts in far-right extremism from C-Rex, the Center for Research on Extremism, Oslo; Archiv der Jugendkulturen, Berlin; the Brandenburg Center for Media Sciences (ZeM); the Italian Open University Guglielmo Marconi, Rome; and from the National Commission for Countering Extremism, UK.