From SkinHeads to Preppys | The press

Forget the neonazi with a shaved skull, with green jacket and combat boots. While the extreme right is gaining momentum everywhere in the West, the look skinhead is no longer popular. It was replaced by more harmless appearance clothes. But the speech remains the same.

This trend is currently studied by Elke Gaugele and Sarah Held, respectively professor and researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. As part of their project Fashion and the Far Right, the New Complexity in Stylethe two researchers explain how the new radical right uses fashion to soften its image and make themselves more acceptable in the eyes of public opinion.

The idea is to look “less threatening”, simply sums up Elke Gaugele, joined by The press in Austria.

Brand and ultra -right clothing have always been handicapped, explains the researcher. THE skinheads With a neonazia tendency have been carrying black and yellow polo shirts Fred Perry since the late 1960s. This look was perpetuated in the 2010s by the Proud Boys of the former Montrealais Gavin Mcinness, co-founder of the very trendy magazine Vicesince has become a figurehead of white supremacism in the United States since a figurehead.

Lonsdale English brand t-shirts were also victims of what Elke Gaugele nicknamed the hatejacking (hate diversion). Worn judiciously under an open jacket, the company logo lets only the four letters NSDA see, which subtle refer to the party of Adolf Hitler, the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party).

In an even more twisted register, radicals of thealt-right have also created the brand The White Race, with the same logo as The North Face, while others have transformed the Detroit Red Wings sweater into that of the Right Wings, with the famous black sun, recognized Nazi symbol, instead And place shelves on the team’s logo wheel.

The Lonsdale and Fred Perry companies did not fail to react to the diversion of their marks for ideological purposes, the first by associating with LGBTQ+ festivals and by advocating inclusion, the second by ceasing any distribution of the polo shirts concerned in America.

But that did not prevent the fascist fashion from flowering, especially in Germany and Austria, where the extreme right is currently experiencing a revival in the political sphere, with the rise of the xenophobic parties of the AFD and the FPö, which argue Particularly for the “remigration” of foreigners, a massive expulsion project motivated by the theory of great replacement.

Revamp

To fill the void left by Lonsdale and Fred Perry, new claws appeared in these two countries. Among them, let us mention the German brand Thor Steinar, which offers a range of T-shirts with a viking aesthetics and more or less explicit slogans (“Save the white continent”), or the Austrian company Phalanx Europa, founded by Martin Sellner, a new headliner of the Austrian identity movement, ideologically close to the FPö and the AFD.

Inspired by Gavin Mcinnes and the French philosopher Alain de Benoist, Sellner quickly understood that pop culture could serve the ideological interests of the extreme right. With Phalanx, he took over the hipster fashion codes to create a collection of clothing with trendy designs and slogans of appearance. Examples among others: a otter print, with the phrase “my river, my rules”, or icons inspired by medieval Christianity.

Harmless, at first glance. Except that most of these t-shirts “convey Islamophobic ideas”, underlines Elke Gaugele, notably referring to the crusades as well as the concept of European-fortress, closed to immigration. Which makes them even more insidious.

This confusion of codes goes even further, since Phalanx now plays the card ” normcore “, Which consists in dressing in the wisest and most beige possible way, in order to appear more frequentable. The logo only appears to be very small on very conservative polo shirts preppy or gray cups without personality.

According to Elke Gaugele, this trivialization strategy is addressed directly to young people in search of an ideological community. “It is a way of mobilizing, of attracting the new generation, showing that you can be trendy while being Nazi,” she said.

Apparently it works. Independent journalist called to cover the extreme Austrian right, Christof Mackinger notes that “many young activists look more normal than 20 years ago”, that “the polo shirts are very visible in their events” and that he There is almost no more skinheads old-fashioned “, with” positive references to National Socialism “.

The result can make the movement more attractive in the eyes of certain young people, recognizes Christof Mackinger. But it hastened to add that in the end, these clothes convey the “same old stories on the breed and the replacement, with a different vocabulary”.

Expansion and resistances

Like the extreme right in Europe, the phenomenon would be up, especially in the online sales market. Elke Gaugele notes that Thor Steiner has an “huge distribution system” which allows it, among other things, to sell in Russia, Finland or the United States.

Legally, it is very difficult to prevent the distribution of these clothes, since most are not explicitly extreme right or neonazis. In Germany, civil society, however, would have mobilized to prevent the opening of Thor Steiner shops in Hamburg, Bremen and Berlin. For its part, the left NGO Laut Gegen Nazis tries to counter this expansion by various strategies, which range from awareness of administrative pirouettes (see other text).

It is, basically, the biggest challenge, when it comes to countering this trivialization strategy. The message is sometimes so coded that it becomes difficult to identify and therefore to fight.

An evil for a good, concludes Simon Knittel, creative director for the advertising agency Jung von Matt and spokesperson for Laut Gegen Nazis. “It is sometimes so hidden, so subtle that only initiates recognize it. In a sense, I think this is good news. The problem is that we don’t always know what to do to fight against it. »»