The Fred Perry brand found itself in the unwelcome spotlight this week when one of its brand ambassadors tweeted that he would no longer wear Fred Perry clothing in the US, now that the self-described “western chauvinist” Proud Boys group have adopted the black-and-yellow striped polo shirts as their unofficial uniform. The company has repeatedly distanced itself from the Proud Boys, describing them as “counter to our beliefs and the people we work with”.
But the problem is bigger than Fred Perry alone. There are dozens of other brands today that are either intentionally selling clothing with far-right messaging or have been co-opted by the far right because of the symbolic resonance of their logos. This isn’t entirely new: the British brand Lonsdale became popular in German far-right scenes decades ago, for example, when youth discovered that a half-zipped bomber jacket over a Lonsdale T-shirt displayed the letters “NSDA” – the first four letters of the German initials of the Nazi party.
The past few years have seen a dramatic shift in the aesthetics of far-right extremism, as the far right has all but abandoned the shaved heads and combat boots of racist skinheads in favour of a broader style that blends in with the mainstream. The new aesthetic includes T-shirts and hoodies laced with coded far-right symbols sold by for-profit brands as well as the suits, jeans and haircuts popularised by the American “alt right”.
Smartness of dress has long been a far-right smokescreen: Hugo Boss, after all, manufactured the Nazi party’s brown shirts and uniforms, using pristine tailoring to mark a stark departure from the combat fatigues and drab colours typically favoured by armies. The Nazis wanted fashion to communicate military strength and aggression. The shaved heads, bomber jackets and combat boots that postwar neo-Nazis co-opted from British working-class youth in the 1980s aimed for the same aggressive impression, creating a uniform aesthetic that would come to dominate the far-right’s youth scene for three decades.
You can’t blame observers, then, for being surprised by the pressed khakis and white polo shirts worn by dozens of young men bearing flaming torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us” as they marched in Charlottesville in 2017. But the clean-cut look wasn’t coincidental. Far-right leaders knew all too well that the public would struggle to connect hate with a style of dress that looked more like the kid next door than the neo-Nazi of their imagination. So in the days leading up to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, a prominent neo-Nazi blogger instructed marchers to dress respectably, noting that their appearance was more important than their ideas in getting people to listen.
The transformation in aesthetics and style is part of a deliberate, top-down tactic on the part of the far right to appear more mainstream in order to make the public more receptive to their ideas. This shift normalises and disrupts the public’s ideas about what extremists look like and makes it harder to interpret and recognise the far right’s ideas as extreme. The strategy wouldn’t have worked if it weren’t so appealing to a younger generation of people open to the far right but eager to shed the stigma of the skinhead look and blend into the mainstream.
