Almost €400,000 of Austrian taxpayers’ money has been committed to a three-year research project at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna examining how right-wing extremism is expressed through fashion.
Researchers are studying clothes ranging from classic skinhead aesthetics to contemporary “Tradwife”, “Old Money”, polo shirts and streetwear which are allegedly used to spread ideology, build networks and normalise extremism.
The team conducts fieldwork, archive research and online analysis, and collaborates with the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University in Washington, DC.
The project, titled “Fashion and the Far Right: The New Complexity in Style” (or “Mode und Rechtsextremismus”), began on October 1, 2023. The Academy lists it as running to September 30, 2026, while the funder’s own research radar gives an end date of July 31, 2027.
It is led by Elke Gaugele of the Institute for Education in the Arts, with Sarah Held as deputy leader, and is financed by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The FWF is itself funded from the public purse.
The approved sum is €393,972, awarded as a single-project grant. The FWF classifies the work as 70 per cent art studies and 30 per cent sociology.
“Right-wing extremist styles are extremely parasitic. They are based on copying and stealing,” Gaugele told the Austria Presse Agentur (APA) on August 3, 2026.
For that reason, she said, clothing styles on both sides of the political spectrum closely resemble one another and can often be told apart only by particular signs such as haircuts or symbols.
Gaugele described the sector as a commercial success story. Since 1989 few labels have gone bankrupt, she said, while new ones have been founded continuously.
To gather evidence the team visited relevant shops in Germany and the United States and interviewed staff. It also assessed online and photographic material and produced network and situation analyses.
One case study is Phalanx Europa, a mail-order label set up in Graz, southeast Austria, in November 2013 by Patrick Lenart and Martin Sellner and tied to the Identitarian Movement.
“There you can observe exactly the turn towards the hipster,” Gaugele said. “A new style is meant to be embodied: We are all good-looking, smart, hip.”
She said a simultaneous revival of 1990s neo-Nazi aesthetics, including bomber jackets and combat boots, could also be observed.
An early phase of the clothing studied was aimed almost exclusively at men before women’s and children’s ranges were added, according to Gaugele. She said the offer for women had since expanded around the “Tradwife” social media trend and the US MAGA movement.
“This targeted activation through fashion, beauty and dating is being driven strongly by the US ‘Tech Right’, that is, the right that comes out of the tech sector,” she said.
Magazines are being launched to reach a large female audience and to create what she called a “Womanosphere” built on anti-feminist and traditional gender roles.
“Today, fashion plays a central role in the formation and expansion of national and transnational networks of the extreme right. Fashion has become a weapon. Currently, the extreme-right fashion aesthetic is characterised by polysemia (ambiguity), which is referred to here as ‘new stylistic complexity'”, the project’s site states.
“The project explores this ‘new complexity’ on the basis of fashion studies and works out the role of fashion in the transnational spread of extreme-right ideologies, violence and affect.”
It asks “How are power, cultural violence, aggression and hatred generated by extreme-right fashion? What role do gender, desire, race, body, ability and class play in this? Which political and economic networks can be seen in extreme-right fashion? Which characters and symbols can be recognised?”
The team is advised by an international board of five extremism specialists drawn from the Center for Research on Extremism in Oslo, the Archiv der Jugendkulturen in Berlin, the Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies, Guglielmo Marconi University in Rome and the National Commission for Countering Extremism in the United Kingdom.
Outputs listed by the FWF include three journal articles, a podcast series and a symposium held in Washington, DC in 2025 under the title “Fashion and the Far Right. On the Weaponization of Style”.
Related activities at the Academy have included a workshop billed as “Fighting Fascism through Fashion: Hacking White Supremacy”, staged as part of the Global Fashioning Assembly in 2024.
Other publicly listed projects at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna include work funded by the FWF and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) on “decolonising” art-history school textbooks, African-diasporic time-spaces, indigenous epistemologies of conflict transformation in Ethiopia and posthumanist critiques of artificial intelligence and the body.
No equivalent publicly funded research project at the Academy examining left-wing extremism, Antifa aesthetics or political violence expressed through fashion appears in the institution’s current research listings or in recent reporting.
