When Patricia and Mark McCloskey stormed out of their lavish St. Louis mansion in a wild-eyed, class-war lather, brandishing guns aimed at nearby Black Lives Matter activists, they committed one of the most risibly deplorable, meme-birthing acts of socio-political optics since U.C. Davis police officer Lt. John Pike pepper-sprayed a seated group of students protesting with the Occupy movement in 2011.
Firearm enthusiasts on Twitter mocked the McCloskeys’ inexpert gun-handling, and armchair fashion pundits, like myself, couldn’t help but notice their chosen uniform for the outburst—Mark’s pink polo shirt and light khakis, and Patricia’s French boating chemise and capri leggings. When they were inevitably declared the champion Ken and Karen of the summer, they also unwittingly pulled a 202-year-old symbol of American normcore into a national polemic by turning it into the label of the un-woke.
The timing of the St. Louis incident couldn’t have been worse, as the company, the country’s oldest apparel brand, filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter due to a variety of financial and market reasons. Here was another stain on its otherwise crisp chinos, its long-held place in the public consciousness as the definition of fashion safety for the conservative class, now an emblem of toxicity.
The psychology and semiotics of fashion dictate that in times of turmoil, your personal style is especially burdened with the symbolic history of your commercial choices, for good or ill. In the late 1960s, clothing was just one of the aesthetic battlegrounds for the visual opposition of “us” vs. “them,” between the John Birch Society and Phyllis Schlafly on the one hand, and the anti-war activists who stopped shaving their armpits and went commando under their ponchos.
Now, the playing field is a lot more complicated—traditional symbols of conformity or anarchy are being further warped by the participants in the frontlines of the culture wars.
The Hawaiian shirt was once an innocent staple of summer, Margaritaville and endless boogie guitar solos. Now, it’s caught a case of political COVID and must be quarantined since being co-opted by 8chan gun enthusiasts called “Boogaloo Bois,” a disparate group of heavily armed anti-government militia-types.
Some of them abhor immigration; some believe there is a white genocide happening, and others are eager to incite a civil war to defend their rights to carry M4 rifles into a Wendy’s. Reece Jones, an author and a professor at the University of Hawaii, went viral on Twitter earlier with a thread explaining the connection.
Along with Brooks Brothers and Robin Williams shirts, some previously inoffensive basics of women’s fashion have also acquired a suspicious patina. Is a sheath still alright to wear, or a wallpaper print dress for that matter? When worn at the White House lectern by Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, they become something else, implements in a broader campaign of disinformation.
The array of body-con outfits at her briefings suggests at first a Tracy Flick-ish brand of intensity but it’s as transparent a costume as some of her specious talking points. “I will never lie to you,” she said during her first appearance in the role. And then, of course, she proceeded to lie straight to the cameras, constantly, as if it was part of a sorority hazing stunt.
Clothes are not the only politicized aspect of our appearances now—nor were they ever; hair is also a prominent battleground. During the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette’s signature powdered pouf was copied by the bourgeoisie, but it was reviled by the starving sans-culottes, who saw it as a wasteful indulgence, another representation of her to loucheness and profligacy.
A more modern hairdo once popular with hipsters is the shaved/faded sides and long-on-top look, or grown-out “high and tight” once favored by everyone from Macklemore to David Beckham. That, too, has been appropriated by far-right figurehead Richard Spencer and his ilk, who have taken to wearing it with Brooks Brothers suits, because Nazis used to wear the hairdo to look tidy under their helmets.
The New York Times once dubbed it the “Hitler Youth,” but it has since gone on to be nicknamed the “Fashy Haircut”—short for fascist, natch—and some of its adherents seem blithely unaware of the politics telegraphed by their coiffure. In 2016, the Washington Post once noted the irony of white nationalists “sporting a hairstyle that’s already been repurposed in the 21st century by young people whose ethos is radical safe-space inclusiveness, not ethnophobic separatism with eugenic undertones.”
In the context of today, that misdirection is precisely the point. The alt-right has intentionally become more sophisticated about blending in, substituting red tank tops and MAGA hats with more ambivalent iconography, the kind of fungible avatars that can be taken at face value, or interpreted as dog whistles if weaponized.
Arguably, another head of hair that looks suspect in the current climate is worn by perennially corporate hyper-conservatives like Jared Kushner. It’s the third-grade-picture-day, combover haircut that announces you have a turtle in your lunchbox and get to wear big boy pants because you haven’t wet the bed in weeks. It’s hair that looks excessively Boy Scouty and feckless precisely because it isn’t, like when predatory octopods camouflage themselves by mimicking the ocean floor.
For maximum due diligence, ask yourself a few difficult questions before opting for the old standbys when getting dressed for your next Zoomtinis. Remember that something that looks “safe” on the surface rarely is. We must all make sacrifices during times of (culture) war, but dressing in flip flops and pajama bottoms is arguably better than walking out of your house looking like you want to annex the Sudetenland.
The McCloskeys, by the way, are looking at a possible felony for what the Circuit Attorney’s Office in St. Louis called unlawful use of a gun “in an angry or threatening manner.” The fashion police, however, has not yet pressed charges, though a guilty verdict seems like a foregone conclusion.
