National Securi-Tee: Political Fashion in the E-Commerce Era

For such a simple garment, T-shirts have always carried an unusually outsized political potency. There are a couple of reasons for this. For one, the T-shirt is a gender-neutral garment which is cheap to produce and circulate. But most crucially, the tee provides an easy-to-customise canvas for its wearers. On January 6th, 2021, insurrections spotlit the emergent clothing economy, geared towards all sorts of fringe political groups that might typically try to remain undetectable or anonymous. In an abundance of footage and images documenting the event, individual subjects and their clothing were shockingly easy to pick out, scrutinise, and analyse.  

Image 1: Jacob Chansley photographed by Blink O'fanaye via Flickr

There was the ridiculous Jacob Chansley (more commonly known as the “QAnon shaman”), who donned the eye-catching but confusing symbolism of the horned fur hat, which he claimed was Nordic but is, in fact, native American. There was the militarised; participants wearing intimidating body armour and openly carrying firearms were more difficult to make light of. And finally, there was the sloganned with their printed t-shirts, hoodies and embroidered baseball and trucker caps. The motifs emblazoned on these garments are not always explicitly violent. Many showcased cringe-inducing agglomerations of the usual eagle-heavy patriot kitsch alongside declarative statements about freedom. Indeed, the zaniness and hyperbole of QAnon’s belief systems and its associated imagery likely delayed it being taken more seriously as an extremist group (Maheshwari and Lorenz, 2021).  

For many, the armed presence on January 6th meant sentiments that had long been bubbling away could no longer be ignored or dismissed as fringe mania. This ‘fashion of fear’ (Sutton, 2023) which includes body armor, bulletproof panelling and military flourishes, sat alongside the fashion of everyday Americans. The slogan t-shirt is a mass-culture product that is emblematic of the ordinary citizen; so, whilst some of the fashion of the insurrection was spectacular or intimidating, most of it was strangely banal. I would argue that this juxtaposition requires a reconsideration of the t-shirt as a particularly salient political unit. I also believe that innovations in digital business models have scaffolded this phenomenon by enabling new forms of designing, selling and circulation. 

Every political movement worth its messaging knows to embrace fashion as an essential aspect of creating a cohesive identity and communicating an ideology. Because fashion is inherently visual, political statements on the clothed body can proliferate visuals rapidly throughout news and social media in ways the spoken word sometimes does not. Katherine Hamnett’s t-shirts in the 1980s used oversized, shapeless designs and aggressive black block lettering to demand “STOP ACID RAIN” or state, as she was photographed in front of Mrs Thatcher herself, that a majority of the British public was not in favour of nuclear armament. Hamnett describes her design choices as being directly influenced by the upcoming photo-op; she knew the wording had to be legible and clear for the shots that would find themselves in the newspapers the next day.

I owned a NO MORE PAGE THREE t-shirt while I was at university, which consciously mimicked Hamnett’s lettering to suggest that pornography and world news may not – and ought not – sit naturally alongside one another. From the mid-2010s, the advent of hyper customisation online and the rise of drop-shipping business models have allowed the political t-shirt (and other low-cost products) to take on both mainstream and marginal forms. As Katie Way (2021) puts it for VICE, in the age of the political meme, this type of motto-heavy merchandise “distils a certain strain of political affinity down to its most potent yet marketable essence.” 

Image 2: The absurdity of individualisation is most evident when search results for broad terms such as ‘political t-shirt' juxtapose pro-MAGA, RBG homages, anarchist symbolism, inspirational quotes about democracy, are all lined up alongside one another in stock image mock-ups.

Websites such as Contrado or Redbubble allow anyone to craft, upload, and format designs for products, which can then be purchased as individual units for low prices. Some entrepreneurs have used this technology to create entire shopfronts of hypothetical products. These are advertised using digital mockups and are only ever produced if someone actually orders them. This model has obvious benefits for those testing emerging, niche or controversial markets, as no up-front capital must be invested in the items before they can be floated to potential buyers. Commercial viability doesn’t have to be a part of the conversation anymore. And it turns out that groups like QAnon, which straddle socioeconomic levels, have considerable buying power. Not only that, but mainstream disavowal of these groups means that bigger corporations do not cater to them, and this vacuum creates a space ripe for exploitation. 

Image 2: Chart showing the growing proportion of independent 3rd party sellers operating on the Amazon platform, over which Amazon has less regulatory control.

Amazon was called out repeatedly for an apparent failure to remove offensive merchandise from its shop front (NBC News, 2018). Here again, innovations in the business model itself may be to blame for creating loopholes in the censorship process. Over half of Amazon’s sales (60%) are now produced and fulfilled by third-party sellers (Amazon, 2023). This means that they are not designed, manufactured and shipped by Amazon but by a fragmented ecosystem of makers and sellers. Unsurprisingly, this pivot away from a centralised system makes products more difficult to regulate at scale. This issue was highlighted recently by journalist Oobah Butler’s grotesque stunt selling their Delivery driver’s urine as an energy drink with little-to-no obstacles on the Amazon website. 

Etsy, a leading sales platform based in the US, banned QAnon-related merchandise from its shops back in October 2020. It did this in line with its previously defined terms of sales, deeming that these items ‘promote[d] hate, incite[d] violence, or promote[d] or endorse[d] harmful misinformation’ (Farokhmanesh, 2020). Unfortunately, this has done little to stem the burgeoning economy of clothing, literature and even (somewhat paradoxically) protective face masks branded with QAnon motifs. Due to the cryptographic nature of the movement itself, much QAnon imagery is esoteric and scattered, making associated merchandise harder to spot in the street. Algorithmically, explicit metadata keyword giveaways are avoided and supplanted for vague terms like ‘tyranny’ and ‘patriot’. WWG1WGA: A string of letters and numbers becomes a mark of ownership that reads more like a number plate for the uninitiated. More arcane allusions to the conspiratorial replace skulls or traditionally recognisable white supremacist symbols. Because of this pressure to mystify QAnon messaging to evade digital detection, this type of merchandise is now able to creep back onto mainstream platforms, just one order removed from its original lexicon. 

Image 3: A pro-gun ownership (and anti-federal-government interference) design from an Etsy shop.

A quick search on Etsy showed Q-themed caps, products celebrating 1776 as a nostalgic “throwback” and a T-shirt calling conspiracy theorists ‘people who figured out the truth before anyone else’ among many others. This last design was overlaid onto an image from a 1950s cookery commercial, echoing the sort of nostalgic all-American imagery of the ‘trad-wife’ movement, which has significant overlaps with the manosphere and incel subcultures. These platforms do not want to be seen to willingly accept designs that espouse hate symbols and controversial speech on their sales channels, but they are equally unable to ringfence what creators can do consistently. 

Image 4: A T-Shirt design from Etsy Shop “PatriotApparel805” 

While most people wouldn’t contest that clothing is a site of political meaning today, further questions should be asked in the face of responsive product design and sales platforms with a looser grip on their merchants' activities. How can the digital democratisation of product design be accompanied by safeguards to detect and intercept content promoting violent ideologies? And if we censor clothing aligned with specific causes from online marketplaces, are we solving a problem or merely displacing it? When is such a ‘dress code’ imposition appropriate, particularly within liberal democratic settings? And perhaps most abstractly but importantly, is a T-shirt ever just a T-shirt? 

References: 

Farokhmanesh, M. (2020). Etsy is banning QAnon merch. [online] The Verge. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/7/21505911/etsy-qanon-merch-ban. 

Foresta, M. (2020). The Economy of Hate: How Online Retailers Profit Off of Right-Wing Extremists. [online] Progressive.org. Available at: https://progressive.org/latest/the-economy-of-hate-how-online-retailers-profit-foresta-201203/ [Accessed 28 Mar. 2024]. 

Maheshwari, S. and Lorenz, T. (2021). Why T-Shirts Promoting the Capitol Riot Are Still Available Online. The New York Times. [online] 19 Jan. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/business/qanon-maga-merchandise-amazon-etsy-shopify.html. 

NBC News (2021). There’s Plenty of Q-Anon Merchandise for Sale on Amazon. [online] NBC News. Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/fringe-conspiracy-theory-qanon-there-s-plenty-merch-sale-amazon-n892561.. 

PatriotApparel805 (n.d.). PatriotApparel805 - Etsy UK. [online] Etsy. Available at: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/PatriotApparel805?ref=l2-about-shopname [Accessed 29 Jan. 2024]. 

Redbubble (n.d.). Political T-Shirts for Sale. [online] Redbubble. Available at: https://www.redbubble.com/shop/?query=political%20t-shirt&ref=search_box [Accessed 29 Jan. 2024]. 

Richter, F. (2020). Infographic: Third-Party Sellers Are Outselling Amazon on Amazon. [online] Statista Infographics. Available at: https://www.statista.com/chart/18751/physical-gross-merchandise-sales-on-amazon-by-type-of-seller/. 

StefanysApparel (n.d.). I Am 1776% Sure No One Will Be Taking My Guns, 1776 Tshirt, USA Flag Gun Shirt, 2nd Amendment Shirt, Patriotic USA Gun Rights, Pro Gun Shirt - Etsy UK. [online] www.etsy.com. Available at: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1110823118/i-am-1776-sure-no-one-will-be-taking-my?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=1776&ref=sr_gallery-1-39&pro=1&sts=1&organic_search_click=1 [Accessed 29 Jan. 2024]. 

Sutton, B. (2023). Bulletproof Fashion. Taylor & Francis. 

Tamsin Blanchard (2017). Did You Know Sweatshops Exist In The UK? [online] British Vogue. Available at: https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/sweatshops-exist-in-the-uk-leicester. 

Way, K. (2021). Etsy Is Full of QAnon and Insurrection Merch. [online] Vice. Available at: https://www.vice.com/en/article/93wznd/etsy-is-full-of-qanon-and-insurrection-merch. 

The "United" Colours of Benetton: Fashion's Depoliticised Utopias and 'Flat' Imaginary

So I read this great paper by cultural commentator Henry Giroux about the evolution of Benetton’s advertising visuals, and I thought it was worth discussing in a bit more detail.

Giroux talks about how we often forget that politics can catalyze certain desires of the public as much as it can inflame tension or be tedious, procedural and beurocratic. I’d add that one of politics’ only possible seductive dimensions is those dynamics that relate to domination and submission – consider the soldier’s often weary but unflinching loyalty to the army. This or the libidinal instincts initiated by the suggestion of lawlessness, revolution and upheaval represent politics’ more tantalising side. 

The mass communications and entertainment industries have subjected politics to the same processes of aestheticization (making decorative) and commodification (making purchasable) as everything else in our world. This helps to bring these seductive dimensions to the fore - and it does so primarily via visuals. 

Giroux talks out how in an age where community cohesion itself is degraded, imagery is used to create false ‘universal visions’ to which we can align ourselves and feel united. These images present us with new forms of ‘tribalism’ we can buy into with little emotional, practical or political investment. Invoking universal ideas necessitates the denial of specificity, which renders the images ahistorical. Ahistorical visions – particularly utopian ones – have often been used as an exploitative weapon of totalitarian regimes, cults or corporations because they suggest social healing in a way that smooths over the contradictions that make such a cohesive public body so difficult to achieve.

Fashion has always tended to present itself as a sort of utopia – the elitist origins of high fashion finery have always promoted fantasy and escapism, which proved difficult to shake until, arguably, the heroin chic aesthetic disrupted the pages of glossy magazines in the 1990s. But as Giroux argues, it has tended to engage in the aforementioned process of levelling out inequalities, tensions and political ruptures that offer us a nuanced vision of the future to work towards: a ‘protopia’ - an imagined future that is once ideal and pragmatic.

United Colors of Benetton advert, French version, F/W 1984, “All the colours in the world”

Giroux looks at Benetton’s 1980s imagery as naïve - presenting us with a utopia of little substance. He bemoans the childish primary colours of the garments and the dynamic but contextless movement of the models who variously leap and play themselves across the spread in a sort of purgatorial white space. This vision of harmony, he declares, reads as being ‘flat’ and depoliticized. He notes how this felt particularly out of step with society at the time in the late 70s and early 80s, which was experiencing a range of profound economic and social shifts.  

United Colors of Benetton advert, Italian version, F/W 1984, “All the colours in the world”

I’ve felt a similar frustration with shows of diversity within fashion images. Don’t get me wrong - I am glad that they are there and more present in the past 5 years, but shouldn’t displays of difference within fashion imagery do more to articulate the real benefits and joys of a more diverse society rather than just regurgitate images of itself for its own sake?

These ‘flat’ images may be racially varied but if they remain ‘flat’ in the way Giroux suggests, they will register no more than stock imagery and be signed off as mere try-hard tropes. He summarizes this brilliantly by calling these half-heartedly world-peace-invoking images as ‘brief shows of flexibility at the surface that mask intransigence at the core.’  

La Pieta, United Colours of Benetton Advert, 1991.

The use of the Benetton logo in their adverts helps to designate them as ‘cultural objects’ as opposed to fine art, or some form of journalistic visual activism. In this way, they also fence off the arena between ‘real politics’ and ‘optics’ whilst also creating and feeding an identity politics of their own that is grounded in the act of buying. That means one thing in the context of the above spreads that are, according to Giroux, ‘flat’ but offensively ornamental and vibrant, but take on a new dimension as Benetton’s visual strategy becomes more politically provocative as it moves into the 1990s.

The critique of fashion images as exclusively articulative of difference (and not productive of it) is a fair one to make given that few creatives are really seizing the medium to create meaningful and catalyzing narratives. However, we should recognise that fashion imagery does have the capacity to encourage our social reality in certain directions.

Kate Moss photographed by Corinne Day, 1990.

The issue is that we tend wrapped up in the examples in which this has negative consequences – like when Heroin Chic caused a youth delinquency panic, or how Victoria’s Secret angels inducted a generation of young women into disordered relationships with food. If we relegate all commercial imagery to only holding, as Giroux says, ‘the promise of producing social criticism’ then we are seriously limiting our pedagogies for both articulating and contributing to a rewiring of the civic imagination. 

In truth, contemporary fashion imagery has been most successful in its ‘production of lifestyle.’ It has managed to give birth to a veritable taxonomy of lifestyles that consumers can participate in through purchasing. Products are mapped out in increasingly convenient ways, previously in fashion editorials that gave order and sense to different garments and now in hyper-targeted digital adverts that follow us around cyberspace.

Different figurations of these lifestyles are harmonized within seductive and surprisingly standardized aesthetic logics. Van der Laan and Guipers define this phenomenon in an excellent paper in which they uncover that fashion imagery has some astonishingly consistent conventions across time that pull together aspirational motifs and specific visions of beauty.

In this way, consumer groups are no longer marketed to by social class but by their ‘preferred identities’ and ‘lifestyle aspirations’ that imply individual choices supersede social inheritances. It seems we aren’t selling to ‘consumers’ anymore... but to ‘characters.’ The online subcultures we are left with – often called core aesthetics – are the logical progression of what Giroux called ‘commodified subject positions’ that were set in motion in the 1980s when Benetton was producing political discourses through their fashion campaigns.

The emphasis of these core aesthetics is on flattened visual styles. Ana Kinsella on the Dirt substack this week described this as ‘people dressing like they’re from the internet.’ These core aesthetics are serviced by the global megacorporations of fast fashion, whose design processes are entirely data-driven and devoid of artistic agency and vision. These core aesthetics lack any consistent and cohesive political ideological glue. This is what makes them flat AND flimsy. These core aesthetics are the product of an algorithm, so that they evolve into neatly delineated marketable segments is entirely natural. 

Giroux also talks about the impact of convergence culture on how Benetton positioned itself in the marketplace editorially – their branded magazine ‘Colors’ merged entertainment forms with subcultural content to appeal to rebellious youth cultures. Of course, that a European company even spells colours in its American form for its brand name and in-house publication has a certain irony to it.

‘Colors’ Magazine by United Colors of Benetton

It contained a blend of advertising image spreads, fun and light-hearted articles and deep dives into global issues. Were these ideas being “contained” by the fashion format they were bound by? Did this sanitize them or keep them away from real political enquiry because they were “just” promotional magazines, even if they presented as more than that? 

‘Colors’ Magazine by United Colors of Benetton featuring a cover image that showed the shocking extent of the migrant crisis

Advertising IS a packaging process and we have to acknowledge that. It is a packaging process of the product, brand equity and political ideas (whether implied or explicitly shown). This packaging process will emphasize, exaggerate, expand or selectively hide certain elements according to the zeitgeist and the vision of the brand team. The exaggerated element often comes in an inflation of the transformative qualities of the product being sold – for example – this dress will change your entire life!

The expansion process builds up the brand story in order to construct and uphold its symbolic mythological value in the eyes of its consumers. What is hidden is what is not shown. All of these decisions and their resulting visuals build the rhetoric of an advertising image and each layer is ripe for deconstruction and analysis - in isolation, in its field and in the broader marketplace of culture.

I sometimes worry that the critique that all commercial forms of media are depoliticized because they are commercial forms may inoculate fashion imagery from being considered powerful, thereby obscuring its true potential. If fashion images are always ‘tainted’ by consumerist processes, it is another visual form that is lost as a tool. We might not have to avert our gaze from these images, but we are forgiven for following through on anything if they are ‘just adverts.’ A robust defence of them is not required, meaningful discussions around their production are not required, and academic enquiry into their significance is simply a quirky personal undertaking.  

United Colors of Benetton advert, 1986.

The strength of advertising as a way of submitting political messages, or at least initiating conversations around subjects in need of awareness, is that it cannot complicate or thicken discourse by its nature. Advertising must simplify and translate as a matter of priority. Historical or academic texts, on the other hand, have not placed much if any importance on accessibility or appearing appealing. Fashion imagery may be considered a sort of commercial folk devil by the academic establishment, but that is exactly why we should be inviting people to interrogate it more frequently. We can’t continue to make demands that fashion becomes political and then shy away from critiquing its politically-engaged products by saying they are entirely negated by the commercial processes intrinsic to the fashion system

We often declare that ‘fashion is an art form’ but if we really stood by this conviction, we would not hesitate to treat it as such.