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The Proud Boys are the latest losers to try to co-opt the classic polo.

Fred Perry's classic laurel wreath polo is instantly recognizable-a staple of men's closets since the brand debuted in 1952. Though they were regularly sported by the likes of JFK, they also have a history of being co-opted by the darker side of skinhead culture, particularly the sect of skinheads who aligned themselves with the far-right extremist group called the British National Front in the 1970s. Since then, Fred Perry has worked hard to escape this image by recruiting brand partners such as tennis star Andy Murray and the late great singer Amy Winehouse. But in the era of Trump, with a bolstered far-right movement, a new chauvinistic group called the Proud Boys-which is basically a fraternity of white guys who like to punch each other and harass peaceful protestors-has adopted the Fred Perry polo as a part of its unofficial uniform, much to the chagrin of the label.

In a statement, Fred Perry chairman John Flynn said:

Frankly I could send you a press release but no need. A little investigation into Fred the man and Fred Perry the company would reveal a lot.

Fred was born the son of a socialist MP [and] became world tennis champion at the time when tennis was an elitist sport. He started a business with a Jewish businessman from eastern Europe. The brand was adopted by the mod movement and systematically has been associated with a diverse group of subcultures from reggae to punk to Brit pop.

It is a shame that we have to even answer the question.

No, we don't support the ideals or the group that you speak of. It is counter to our beliefs and the people we work with.

It's obvious that at the center of the Proud Boys culture is some extremely deep insecurity that these losers men are desperately fighting. But John Flynn is right. It is a shame that the Proud Boys, who claim to be accepting of black and gay people but whose very existence is based on being proud of the white male's contribution to Western society (who are also responsible for the genocide and enslavement of black and indigenous people, so wrap your head around that little paradox), would try to steal something as cool and classic as a Fred Perry polo from everyone else.

Earlier this year, neo-Nazis tried to co-opt New Balance sneakers after the brand's soft endorsement of President Trump. It didn't stick. So when it comes to Fred Perry polos, let's not let the Proud Boys have them. If you're a decent, non-racist, non-chauvinist guy, wear your Fred Perry polo with some chinos, jeans, on the golf course, or under a navy blazer out on a date. And do it proudly.

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Fred Perry Wants Alt-Right Bros to Stop Wearing Their Polos

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The Proud Boys are the latest losers to try to co-opt the classic polo. Fred Perry's classic laurel wreath polo is instantly recognizable-a staple of men's closets since the brand debuted in 1952.

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If you were in any doubt whatsoever that Donald Trump's victory has emboldened the darkest forces in American society, those doubts should be dispelled by watching how the "alt-right" celebrated his victory.

"Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!" was how white nationalist and alt-right founder Richard B Spencer proclaimed the achievement. He was careful to pick up a barely-visible water glass before extending his arm at a familiar angle. Spencer was dressed carefully in a three-piece suit, his slicked hair parted severely. Men in suits in the audience were less cautious, and lifted their right arms empty-handed. Some had their hands flat in what was plainly indistinguishable from a Nazi salute. The audience erupted in loud, defiant applause. It cannot be long before Spencer grows a moustache to complete the look.

Some bridled at superficial descriptions of Spencer. Many got upset at the US website Mother Jones describing him as a "dapper white nationalist", but there is no escaping the fact that he pays attention to what he wears. Like the monstrous, ultra-conservative and Islamaphobic Norwegian Anders Breivik who killed 77 people and injured 319 in 2011, Spencer is clearly narcissistic.

In the manifesto Anders Breivik published before the Oslo and Utøya massacre, the murderer (who advocated the deportation of Muslims) cautioned his readers to dress smartly but to avoid symbols associated with Nazism. Breivik is hero-worshipped by some extremist white supremacists. The glass of water Spencer lifted allows him to avoid the charge of aping the Hitler salute, despite the obvious resonance.

"Heil Hitler" was adopted in the Thirties by Nazis to signal obedience to the party's leader, and it became mandatory. Hail is the English translation. Lifting a glass of water with a rigid right arm and shouting "Hail Trump" is to the Hitler salute what the alt-right is to the darkest forces of the 20th century, an imitation that draws from the source material while clothing it in plausible deniability. If you agree with the alt-right, then the message is plain as day, but if you challenge it then it can be laughed off as a joke or a coincidence. If you call them out they accuse you of taking offence where there was none to take, of being a " cuck", a " snowflake", or any of the other banal terms they use to deflect criticism.

"America was until this past generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity," the alt-right leader Spencer claimed to his adoring fans, demanding that "It is our creation. It is our inheritance and it belongs to us." This must come as alarming news to native Americans whose country was forcibly taken from them by white settlers, but the claim should be no surprise to anyone who understands the dangerous appeal of Nazism in the 20th Century. Adolf Hitler was spending a small fortune on tailored suits in the Thirties and took great care over his image. Hitler understood the appeal of a safe space for the white population, too.

Milo Yiannopoulos is teaching the internet how to hate

Clothing isn't the only thing the alt-right seems to have borrowed from their favourite Norwegian killer. In his manifesto, Breivik suggested that American white supremacists play the very card that Richard B Spencer is now deploying when he tries to claim America as the land belonging to a marginalised white population: "Rhetoric related to 'indigenous rights' is an untapped goldmine which has currently been deluded and sidetracked due to "rhetorical contamination" from the US. If you use "white nationalist" rhetoric you are instantly placed in the same category as Hitler. This is not the case with rhetoric related to indigenous rights as this rhetoric is usually related to the Aboriginal or Native American struggles." Forces within the alt-right seem to have borrowed ideas from a mass-murderer about how to repackage Hitler's agenda for winning power without the baggage of the tarnished brand.

There is no intellectual case for what Spencer and his ilk claim, no proper basis to argue the supremacy of whites, or their entitlement to claim American territory. It is merely hatred and prejudice. Breivik's manifesto, the rambling diatribe of an evil man, described much of what we see today with Spencer's alt-right. Breivik said of the bizarre claims in his manifesto that "Much of the information... has been deliberately kept away from the European peoples by our governments and the politically correct mainstream media" and that political correctness - the practice of not using inherently prejudiced and discriminatory language - is a form of "cultural Marxism." This methodology of self-delusion and purposeful victimhood, this "untapped goldmine" of political power is the alt-right's real inheritance.

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Like many despicable narcissists who have come before him, Spencer dresses up smartly to project what he considers to be his superiority. The boldness with which Trump's supporters are openly hailing the success of the president-elect in a manner evocative of the Nazis, the metamorphosis of a Norwegian mass killer's ideas within a popular political movement in America, and the election of a President who gives these men such cause for celebration should not be ignored. The clothing worn by the alt-right may be new, but the ideas are second-hand, and extremely dangerous.

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Why we shouldn't say fascists are 'well dressed'

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If you were in any doubt whatsoever that Donald Trump's victory has emboldened the darkest forces in American society, those doubts should be dispelled by watching how the "alt-right" celebrated his victory. "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!" was how white nationalist and alt-right founder Richard B Spencer proclaimed the achievement.

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This week the first lady of the United States, Melania Trump, was in Kenya for a "stop" on her " Africa tour". Her decision to appear at Nairobi National Park wearing a white pith helmet, crisp white shirt and light brown jodhpurs made headlines in international media, which correctly described the pith helmet as a symbol of colonial rule.

So much about the concrete history of white supremacy is poorly remembered or conveniently forgotten. As such, it may be difficult for many to understand why the US first lady chose to dress up in the costume of a colonial settler in Kenya in 2018. To begin to understand the historical resonances she was tapping into (consciously or otherwise) it's helpful to consider the pith helmet in terms of its material history. What is a pith helmet? Who wore one and why? How has it come to stand as such a pungent emblem of empire? What cultural meanings are attached to the pith helmet, and should we think of the US first lady's decision to wear a pith helmet as a scandal?

White Europeans have long been obsessed with the supposed relationship between race, culture and climate. We have persistently tried to stabilise racial difference as a natural and scientific fact, rather than a set of social and cultural ideas that are perpetually being formed, always contested and re-ordered.

Nineteenth-century colonists were supported by leading scientific and medical opinion in their belief that solar radiation in "the tropics" attacked white people's nervous systems and rendered them infertile. Other symptoms of exposure were thought to include laziness, depression, outbursts of excessive passion, insomnia and memory loss. This notion of warm climates as profoundly hostile reflected the deeply held conception of the colonies as, in every sense, another world.

Pith helmets were often worn by colonisers alongside other protective paraphernalia, such as red vests and "spine pads" (a quilted piece of cloth) worn down the back of the shirt to protect the nervous system from the feared "actinic ray". Some even wore pith helmets and spine pads indoors, since even beneath a tin roof they considered themselves in constant peril from the tropical sun. Spine pads were a standard issue item in British Army kit in the early 20th century.

Conveniently for wealthy whites in the colonies, other medical recommendations included forbidding whites from doing manual labour outdoors (they were to undertake supervisory roles only), vacationing to cooler climates at regular intervals, and the repatriation of white children from the colonies after the age of five (typically to an expensive private boarding school back "home").

The pith helmet was part of a pseudoscientific discourse that enforced class, as well as racial domination, since only the rich could follow such medical advice.

The pith helmet is sometimes used to denote a "frontier" spirit of adventure and intrepid exploration. This is wrong. In fact, their historical social role was to emblematise white fragility and anxieties, as well as blurring the distinction between white civilians and the colonial police and military, who also wore pith helmets.

Colonialism extracted labour and resources from "natives" by ordering colonial societies through extreme and everyday forms of violence. But it was always necessary to insist that despite enjoying the protection of colonial states armed to the teeth in order to immiserate and exploit subject peoples, it was whites - and white women, in particular - who were the most vulnerable group in the colony.

In this sense, the pith helmet represents not only colonialism, but whiteness, too. We might think of whiteness as an identity that always noisily insists on its own vulnerability (despite social and economic realities to the contrary) as the principal justification for the oppression of racialised others.

Kenya provides an especially compelling historical example of this dynamic. The anticolonial uprising of the Land and Freedom Army in the 1950s (more widely known as the "Mau Mau" due to colonial propaganda) became notorious for "savage" violence against white settlers.

Through sensationalised news coverage, Hollywood films and salacious novels, the notion of "Mau Mau" as a black bogeyman butchering white women and children was widely popularised. In fact, just 32 European civilians were killed during the whole affair. White settlers responded to these losses by explicitly calling for genocide, rallying to demand the colonial government exterminate the entire Gikuyu people.

We now know more about the scale and brutality of Britain's counterinsurgency in Kenya thanks to recent historical scholarship and the landmark court case brought to the High Court in London by elderly Kenyan victims of colonial torture in 2009 (the UK government eventually admitted to the torture and paid out compensation).

Exact figures are contested, but it is known that tens of thousands of Kenyans were killed by colonial forces during the uprising, while hundreds of thousands more were detained in concentration camps and fortified villages, subjected to routine brutality and forced labour. Rape and castration were common forms of torture, and many victims of such atrocities are still with us today.

My own view is that the US first lady's decision to wear a pith helmet was appropriate and should be taken seriously. The regime she represented in Kenya is a white supremacist one. Her husband campaigned successfully under the fascist slogan "America First," and has since implemented his " Muslim ban" and encouraged the detention of migrants, including separating children from their parents and keeping them in "tender age" cages.

The policies and ideological grounding of the current US administration - and the bogus fears animating its supporters - represent a continuation of earlier forms of imperialism. There is no attempt to disguise the fear and hatred towards people of colour, at home or abroad. The pith helmet makes the connection quite clear.

No country in the West has adequately reckoned with the historical reality of colonialism. Until such a reckoning takes place through broad-based education and memorialisation, it is difficult to see how Western societies can ever move beyond the powerful investment in whiteness that so disfigures our common political, social and spiritual life.

Like Melania Trump, too many in the West look at today's world not as it really is, but through a veil of racial and colonial delusions. As the writer Nanjala Nyabola reflected on the US first lady's visit to Kenya: "We joke, but it's deeply disturbing to see someone who seems to believe that your whole life is some kind of colonial fantasy hellscape."

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elliot Ross

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When Melania went to Africa wearing a pith helmet

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This week the first lady of the United States, Melania Trump, was in Kenya for a "stop" on her " Africa tour". Her decision to appear at Nairobi National Park wearing a white pith helmet, crisp white shirt and light brown jodhpurs made headlines in international media, which correctly described the pith helmet as a symbol of colonial rule.

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In Charlottesville, demonstrators turned out in polos and khakis. But their seemingly innocuous clothes spoke volumes.

When the Ku Klux Klan rebooted itself as a largely white supremacist outfit, starting in 1915, it took on the now-signature white robes for two reasons: to intimidate, but also to hide. They were cowards, afraid recognition would upend their lives, so they went to great lengths to obscure their faces and bodies. "They had no desire to be exposed in any kind of way," explains Patricia A. Turner, the dean and vice provost of undergraduate education at UCLA, who has written several books on African-American culture.

But when demonstrators assembled in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, those white robes were few and far between. To be sure: Markers of white supremacy such as Nazi and Confederate flags were on display. But on the march, it looked as if an army of JC Penney mannequins had become sentient. Scores of white men dressed in crisp polos and khakis, turning the uniform of business-casual blasé into a white-hot statement. "What we see in a lot of images coming out of Charlottesville are these very clean-cut-looking young men," says Susan Campbell Bartoletti, the author of They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group and Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow. "They're putting the face of a gentleman on values that are, in my opinion, anything but gentlemanly."

A weekend that exposed the seams and rot of American life in so many other ways revealed this, too: That the work of white supremacy is no longer performed by cloak-and-dagger vigilantes. It's done in broad daylight. And it's done by people (mostly young, white men) wearing the most all-American clothes they can imagine: polos and khakis. The uniform of white hate is now average, mundane, the stuff of everyday American life. It is haunting.

Tracking the evolution of what's worn by white supremacist groups-specifically the KKK-shows that they have reached what looks like the end stage of a longterm image overhaul. Racism is inextricable from the character of past- and current-day America, but the election of Donald Trump validated a group that used to feel the need to remain hidden. Accordingly, the clothing of white hate has changed: It, too, has become more mainstream.

The story begins in 1865, when the Klan was first formed. Early members wore stilts under their robes to make themselves appear nine feet tall. "The costumes made them larger than life," says Bartoletti, "[and] made them appear to be supernatural, and some of their tricks were to seem as though they had magical talents as well." Turner adds that "[the KKK] played on the notion that slaves were afraid of ghosts and spirits, and so they tended to try to disguise themselves in some way that would add a level of intimidation to what they were about and be specters, ghost-like in appearance."

The next wave of the Klan, which appeared in 1915, donned the white robes and pointed hats that we mostly associate with the KKK today. Over time, though, what's worn by the different nodes in the network of white supremacist groups has grown subtle. Obvious robes became small signifiers: things like a shaved head, Doc Martens, suspenders, and a litany of tattoos that made it clear the wearer was part of a certain group. These marks were subtle, but they were still outside the norm. If you saw a guy with a shaved head wearing suspenders and Doc Martens threaded with white or red laces, you knew you'd likely found a white supremacist goon.

Today the signifiers are sanded down even more. Groups like the Proud Boys have attempted to mark Fred Perry polos (the brand strongly denounced the group), which have long been associated with skinheads, as their own. The wide-scale adoption of khakis and polos marks the culmination of a sustained attempt by white supremacists to rebrand themselves: from the other to the mainstream. But what we saw in Charlottesville this weekend goes further.

In 2006, while researching for her book, Bartoletti attended a Klan rally, or "congress." Before the start of the weekend, she was sent a list of rules. The third directive dealt with clothing: "We encourage casual dress such as worn in most offices or to church... Please no camoflauge [sic] clothing or 'Biker' attire." The sheet also barred foul language and weapons. "If I didn't know I was at the Klan meeting, they would have seemed like very ordinary people that I would see in the supermarket where I live," says Bartoletti.

This reorientation of the Klan is about both dress and ideology. While the original iterations of the Klan were founded on hate, the group now claims to be about a twisted sort of "love"-"love for the white race," Bartoletti explains. This is at least part of what's influencing white supremacists' newfound willingness to show their faces to cameras. "If they believe their purpose is around a promotion of whiteness and the goodness of whiteness... You could make the case that there's no shame or fear that comes from that, that you should be willing to own that and be willing to be public with it," says Turner.

Last year, New York magazine's style site The Cut wrote an excellent story about the ways the alt-right uses style as a propaganda tool, with alt-right figures like Richard Spencer adopting so-called " dapper" style to add a veneer of respectability to deeply racist arguments. But the khaki-wearing demonstrators in Charlottesville weren't trying to be fashionable-they were trying to blend in. And in doing so, they've turned the blandest items in our closets into a dog whistle. Is your neighbor wearing a polo and khakis because he's a style-agnostic dad? Or is he just actively supporting the creation of a white ethno-state?

It's also worth pointing out that the new white supremacist uniform bears an uncanny resemblance to President Trump's off-duty style. There's not much visible difference between a demonstrator in a Make America Great Again hat, a white polo, and khakis and what the president bulges out of when he's hitting the links.

Once these groups come into power, Bartoletti suggests, they no longer feel the need to hide. Especially not when today's white supremacy groups have a president who takes three times as long to repudiate their beliefs as he does a critical Saturday Night Live skit, a president whose response to last weekend's events was condemned by pretty much everyone but white supremacist sites like the Daily Stormer.

Toward the end of our conversation, Bartoletti points out a particularly chilling antecedent to the uniforms seen in Charlottesville. She directs me to Nazi propaganda: posters of clean-cut white men towering over people and, in one, shoveling aside presumably Jewish and black men. Several posters show the Nazis dressed in white button-ups and khakis. The resemblance is haunting. "And they didn't hide their faces either, did they?" Bartoletti asks rhetorically.

This uniform is repeated across at least two other Nazi propaganda posters I encountered. While the Nazi rise began under the same cover of darkness the KKK once sought out, these posters are a stark reminder of what it became, the ruling power. The group stepped out of the shadows, endured the media's mockery, and emerged with a carefully manicured image. The posters don't show uniformed Nazis-they show a twisted kind of average guy.

Until very recently, khakis and polos reminded us of suburban dads and prep-school uniforms. Now white hate groups have added themselves to this all-American list. "They want to show that they are standing for what they believe is the true American," says Bartoletti. They want you to believe that they're the same people we go to church with on Sundays (even though the self-professed Christian KKK has been denounced by every major Christian denomination).

For years, white supremacists dressed to set themselves apart, to hide and to scare. Charlottesville showed us that the most sinister evolution of their uniform, and the hate it symbolizes, isn't about fear and ghosts and standing apart. It's meant to achieve inclusiveness and assimilation. It means that hate doesn't need to live underground when it can blend in right next door.

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How Polos and Khakis Became the New Uniform of White Supremacy

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In Charlottesville, demonstrators turned out in polos and khakis. But their seemingly innocuous clothes spoke volumes. When the Ku Klux Klan rebooted itself as a largely white supremacist outfit, starting in 1915, it took on the now-signature white robes for two reasons: to intimidate, but also to hide.

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Hey Paige and Justin!
So excited to get this going. The three "costumes" I had in mind are pictured here; would love to know about others that you have researched.

I would be happy to either consult on what you both put together, co-present, or all of the above. Let me know your ideas and preferences. I'll share a couple presentations so you can see the academic/pop commentary that we are aiming for in the series.