The New Obscurity in Style. Alt-right Faction, Populist Normalization, and the Cultural War on Fashion from the Far Right

The article shows how far-right politics since the millennium has increasingly made use of fashion to influence populations in Europe and North America. It therefore considers fashion as cultural material upon which collective identifications are built and further motivate political action. Its topical diagnosis on the Zeitgeist of a “new obscurity in style” embraces the political framework of the Frankfurt School in terms of shared positions and conceptions in the historical development of the New Right in Europe and North America that presently reinforce the dogma of the cultural revolution of the right. Accordingly, this critical study dissects the rise and the rhetoric of far-right fashion brands, the weaponization of AI fashion technology, as well as the infiltration by extreme-right networks of (digital) media discourses and contemporary theories on culture and fashion. From the alt-right faction to deliberately produced confusion, to downplaying the harms and normalization of a racist, white-supremacist, anti-immigration, nation-first militarist agenda, to the role of the fashion designer as a far-right activist, to the implementation of fashion profiling technologies in the extent of cyber warfare, the paper reveals the different political strategies underlying the new obscurity in style. In conclusion, it examines the concept of metapolitics as the dominant scheme behind the far right’s weaponization of fashion and fashion technologies.