The Shirt Makes the Man

Oswald Mosley stepping out with the Pentaverate

Cool. Back on 420 in 2020, Dr. Juan Francisco Fuentes Aragónes, Professor of History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, wrote an article which surveys the colored shirt movements in Europe of the interwar period. Not just fascists, but communists and even moderate groups like the Social Credit Party, even Scouting.

Shirt movements were....the expression of an old relationship between clothing and politics, body and power, but also the consequence of the dramatic circumstances of the interwar period, dominated by the mysticism of violence, the “brutalization of politics” (Mosse 1990, 159-81), the prominence of young people and masses, the charismatic power of the leader and the importance of “senso-propaganda” (Chakhotin 1940, 170) in the new political culture of the 1930s. Totalitarianisms that emerged at the time understood perfectly the enormous potential of these uniformed movements for the conquest or conservation of power and for training the masses, or their youthful and radical avant-gardes, in their regimented conception of life. This is why the history of the shirt movements is also that of totalitarianism in its golden age.

from Shirt Movements in Interwar Europe: A Totalitarian Fashion

Good stuff. I'm surprised I didn't run across this paper while I was looking up information for my previous posts.

Uniforms aren't as much in fashion now as in times past, but as we saw in our post about the Proud Boys, there is still a drive towards uniformity. The PB's prefer black and yellow Fred Perry polo shirts (business casual Freitag?)

Skinheads have long favored Fred Perry or Lonsdale shirts and Doc Marten's boots. The color of the laces, at least in Florida circa 1990, meant something: red for leftists, so-called "redskins" or SHARP (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) skins; white laces were used by Neo-Nazi skins.

Skinheads, with their "look" and propensity for violence, are the less-organized heritors of the "shirt movements" of the 1930's.

Also worth a mention are the color codes of gang bandanas: eg blue for Crips, red for Bloods. Not political, but it is analogous in that a specific color of an article of clothing signifies an allegiance, and the wrong color in the wrong place could lead to an unpleasant and violent misadventure.

Anyway, the article probably means I won't need to do another post about fascist paramilitaries in Europe!

I actually came across Aragónes' article while looking up info on the Baeguisa (백의사), the fascist "White Shirts" or "White Clothes Society" of Korea. Ardently anti-Communist, they were funded by the CIC, or Counterintelligence Corps, a precursor to the CIA.  Not sure if this outfit predated, postdated, or same-dated the OSS.

NK News writes about the Baeguisa and their assassination campaign of the 1940's....US-financed fascist terrorists. Par for the course. Info in English about these guys is scarce, so enjoy Aragónes' article instead....