Fashion and the Far Right: The New Complexity in Style
NeoFashFarRight is an in-depth fashion studies research that investigates the current role of fashion for the far right in Europe and the US. At the Lange Nacht der Forschung Teresa Fischer (MA, PraeDoc) will give a short introduction to the project and present first research results. Visitors will also have the chance of listening into “Style Struggles”, our freshly produced podcast series.
NeoFashFarRight is an in-depth fashion studies research that 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) for its strategic purposes. In the course of this, according to our diagnosis of the time, 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”. 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.