‘Insurrectionist Chic’ Is a Growing Fashion Trend as Well as a Movement

The January 6th Insurrection at the Capitol last year has become a “serious growth sector” according to analysts.

Newsweek: [Organizer] Thomas Edward Caldwell’s attorney David Fischer countered government charges of conspiracy to cause violence. He said his client’s “locker room” talk was merely “male bravado … and didn’t result in him committing one act of violence—on January 6th or before.”

Was Caldwell an armed insurrectionists or just play soldiers lost in a world of fantasy army? Both, says David Pedersen, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California San Diego. He points to the garb of the Capitol sackers as “aspirational and motivated”: the protestors “want to be seen as” soldiers, as something honorable.

The prepper, survivalist and militia movements all have a “whole fashion component,” says Pedersen, one that represents a set of norms and standards that already exists in society, “a grammar and a vocabulary” that is co-opted and inflected in their dress-up army.

“It’s a wish for recognition, to be heard, based on the notion that they are less heard than they want to be,” Pedersen tells Newsweek.

Groups like Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have some of the same “qualities as Greek fraternities and street gangs … masculinized social networks that offer a lot of material and social resources to their members.”

The military dress itself is worthy of closer examination. According to him, analysts say that insurrectionist clothing—from MAGA hats to t-shirts, to military uniforms and accoutrements, and all of the aftermarket modifications—is a “serious growth sector .. touted as rapidly growing in contrast to the rest of the U.S. garment-fashion sector.”

“It may or may not be a movement, but it certainly is a market,” Pedersen says. A big part of doing what they are doing is shopping, choosing this garb as consciously as others who wear their own identifying uniforms. “It is not just a statement of militarism but also a statement—that from Hurricane Katrina through COVID—that society is precarious enough to leave people without basic needs, what they literally need to survive.”

“The way they dress, this larger language of patriotism, of societal protection, their allegiance to these ideals,” is clinging to a language that everyone wants to own.