The first time I meet Kenneth I’m struck by his guilelessness. There’s something boyish about him, even though he’s a man, and an accomplished one at that. His face is open, and his body language suggests someone who is finally at ease with themselves. He lives a little bit in Nigeria, a little bit in Italy, a little bit in Austria, and all the travelling seems to have given him a particular way of engaging with strangers.

I was born in Lagos, and when I was four my family moved to the Austrian countryside. My dad got a job at Ikea and my mum eventually started working as a cleaner in a nursery. In Nigeria my mum had owned a restaurant, so when I was really little she was always beautifully dressed. In Europe she continued wearing a lot of African clothes, for going out or to church or just on a regular day. She would wear head-wraps and import fabrics from Nigeria and have her clothes made. She used to get clothes made for the rest of the family too, but my dad always preferred his three-piece suits. He worked for the government when we lived in Lagos, and he had a really good sense of Western style even then. On weekends, he would wear nylon tracksuits – this was the Nineties – and Nike sneakers but on weekdays he was always in a shirt and a tie. He was super precise about everything: his shirt had to align with his trousers and his tie had to be just so. I grew up in a super African home, moving to Austria didn’t change that. My way of dressing did change though. I hardly ever wore my African clothes anymore, maybe once a year or so. I preferred Western styles: Nike, Adidas, Timberland, Fubu. I suppose traditional clothes felt too much like costume to me in Vienna, they made me feel self-conscious. I already stood out like a sore thumb. For my mum though they were just clothes, her clothes, and she always carried them beautifully. I still remember the silhouette of her kaftan sleeves as she was making a particular gesture. There’s actually no one who has influenced me as much as my mother has. I think of my collections as a part of my mother’s story and legacy, and I can see her wearing most of the pieces. My mum always had a great eye for detail. I remember her getting ready for church on Sundays, and putting on her extravagant trads with Italian shoes and gold jewellery.

When he was alive my dad was the dandy in the family – I really looked up to him. His attention to cut and silhouette is something I’ve tried to emulate in my work. My parents really instilled in me the importance of self care: my dad wouldn’t let me leave the house if I hadn’t showered, and my mum taught my brother and me to lotion our bodies every day. I really think my parents are the reason I love clothes. Even though I knew nothing of the Western fashion industry, I always knew the value of beautiful clothes, and of looking good. My parents had their work clothes, and their traditional garments, or trads as we call them, for special occasions. They were always dressed for the occasion. Eventually, in Austria, my mum started wearing Western clothes too. I think I must have been ten when I saw her in jeans for the first time. Throughout my early childhood she was always this very traditional African woman, and women like that don’t wear trousers. As a married, traditional, African woman you don’t wear anything that shows your body off too much. But moving to Europe changed her, and with time she adapted to the customs of her new country. I still remember being with her when she got her first pair of jeans – she was so excited, ‘Oh my god, my body is so nice. It’s so nice to see my body!’ She started wearing sneakers and hoodies, and I’d be like ‘Mu-um you’re wearing my shoes!’ [Laughs] I’m still really close with my mum. We’re the same star sign – Aries – and we’re both really stubborn and hardworking, always looking out for others and trying to provide.

I didn’t know much about Western designers or the fashion industry until I got to fashion school. We never had any fashion magazines in the house, and my parents didn’t take us to museums or anything like that. A friend of mine showed me Vogue when I was a teenager. I’d heard about Giorgio Armani and Versace but I didn’t know who Margiela was until I started studying fashion at university. I remember when I first had the idea of becoming a designer: I’d already enrolled in psychology at university when my friends told me about this place where you could study design and fashion. I knew immediately that’s what I wanted to do. So I called my mum and said, ‘Mum mum I think I want to study fashion!’ And she told me, ‘I’ve been waiting for you to say that Kenneth.’ She already knew. So, at nineteen I moved to Vienna. I loved studying; if I could I’d do it again and again and again. I loved the freedom and the sense of experimentation and acceptance: wearing skirts in the street, or just a piece of fabric wrapped around your body. The first day of uni I wore a cheap fabric from the market wrapped around my waist with a shirt and platform shoes. My hair was styled straight up, punk style. I felt great.

It’s funny actually, when I was a student the people who wore their own designs were never seen as cool. I stopped wearing the clothes I made then. The anti-fashion trend was really strong back then, norm-core, plain and sombre pieces. People wanted to look as if they didn’t care too much. Now I love wearing my own designs, and if I wasn’t working so much I’d wear them all the time. I’m not yet at the stage of my career, when working means looking fancy behind a big desk. I move around constantly, between all sorts of environments so I can’t wear anything too precious. Also I can’t afford too many of my own clothes yet. [Laughs] That’s the reality. I tend to be quite pragmatic about my work, I think about how comfortable the clothes will be, and how people will be wearing them in real life as opposed to in a magazine or Instagram picture. I don’t want to make something that isn’t relevant. Actually when I talk about ‘comfort’ I think of it not just in terms of how a garment feels on the body but also about the story behind it. I think clothes should make their wearers feel comfortable, in their own skin and in the world. If you feel comfortable, confidence follows. I want my clothes, the ones I wear and the ones I make, to have something to say. A lot of craftsmanship goes into my work and the details are really important. In my own clothes I also want to feel, and be seen as, aware. Aware of what’s happening around me, on a micro and macro level. I’m talking about awareness on multiple levels: about the history of the garment, and its provenance, about where the wind is blowing.

I like to show my body off, yes, but it depends on the context of course. I love the waist, the shoulders, the arms, on both men and women. I’ve been making backless jackets for my collection recently, and I love wearing those. Sometimes, in Lagos, I’ll put a sleeveless, backless T-shirt on, just to provoke. Lagos society is traditional and conservative: it doesn’t fully allow you to express yourself, or even be yourself. If you see a woman in a miniskirt, people assume she’s a prostitute. Gender roles are conformist, and respectability is extremely important. So that makes me want to rebel a bit: I want people to be like, ‘What is going on here?’ I get a lot of looks. I want to provoke the system, question it a bit and make a statement. In Europe I dress differently. That tension that’s so pronounced in Nigeria isn’t there in Vienna or Milan or Paris. People also don’t dress up like they do in Lagos. They wear the same clothes day and night – I do too. I dress in a more relaxed way, and I’m not really concerned about making a statement. A few years ago I loved wearing super-tight sports clothes, top and bottom. I’d put a pair of tight running shorts on and go about my day. Like I said, I like showing off my body! But now I dress differently because I’m always working so I have to be comfortable and able to move around. On a typical day I’ll put on a cashmere hoodie and white denim trousers. But then if I’m invited to dinner at a friend’s house say, or if I’m going out for drinks later I’ll get changed. Then I don’t dress for practicality anymore – I dress for fantasy. Fantasy is actually a really important part of dressing. Mostly though I just dress for happiness. That’s a state of mind I try to invoke: joy.

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is put on body lotion, just like my mum taught me. Then I think about what to wear that day. I sleep naked so I always take all my jewellery off before going to bed. In the morning I put it back on again. My jewellery is usually delicate, and all gold. A lot of it I got from my mother: necklaces, rings, earrings, bracelets. I wear them everyday so they start feeling like a part of me. I’ve probably worn most pieces at least a decade, some I’ve had for fifteen years. When I’ve had a shower and put my jewellery on, I think about what I’ll be doing that day and what clothes to put on. If I’m in Lagos that’s particularly important. I mean, yes I like to provoke but I also need to get work done. So if I’m going to an area that’s more conservative and homophobic, I’m obviously not going to dress in transparent trousers or a backless jacket. Then I wear classic, practical pieces: shirts and jeans. Or I’ll wear trads. I like wearing traditional clothing in Nigeria, people take you more seriously then. You can get more money wearing trads actually. If I have a meeting in an office I’ll put my trads on and hold my mobile phone in a particular way so as to command power. When I’m dressed like that, I hear ‘Yes sir yes sir yes sir!’ You really get treated differently depending on what you wear in Lagos. If the police stop you, and you’re young but wearing trads, you’re much safer. Then at night I’ll change into something more fun and experimental: Issey Miyake or my own design. Night time is for play. How to dress to attract a lover? Well I think about my body first; which part of it do I want to show off? I like to dress sexy for moments like that. There was a time when I was super into ankles: I wouldn’t wear trousers that came below my ankles and I paid attention to everybody else’s ankles too. Now I love necklines, how they frame the face and shoulders. It’s important to think about proportion. I like tank tops to show my shoulders and arms and I like see-through – up and down. I love a see-through pant. And I love it when people show their bodies – as long as it doesn’t look cheap. That’s a fine balance though and there isn’t a precise formula for how to avoid that particular pitfall.

Sometimes in Nigeria I get frustrated, like, ‘If I was in Europe I’d be able to wear that jacket. Oh my god I wish I could wear it right now!’ That actually happens to me all the time. Things are changing slowly though; a lot of people from the diaspora are returning and they’re bringing different, less conservative, ways of being and dressing with them. I love wearing kaftans in Nigeria but I would never wear one the West. I don’t wear my trads in Europe at all anymore; I get looked at in the wrong way. Moving between continents and cultures like I do requires some skill when it comes to dressing. I have to be mindful of how much I push rules on both continents. I mean, I try not to care about what people think or if I’m being stared at. I want to retain the power; I don’t want the wrong looks to make me waver or feel insecure. But it doesn’t always work. I remember once, six or seven years ago in New York. When packing for the trip, I was thinking about how multicultural the city is, and how many black people live there. This was during an Afrocentric moment in fashion; Solange was wearing headwraps and colourful patterns and fashion was full of ‘African-style’ prints. So I packed a bunch a trads. The first day I went out wearing a kaftan people wouldn’t stop staring at me in the street. And the ones who stared the most were other black people. I felt so uncomfortable, I just turned around and went home to change. [Laughs] It was really bad actually. I felt like Eddie Murphy in ‘Coming to America.’ That was the last time I wore trads in the West.

Growing up as an immigrant in Europe was really difficult. In small town Austria I stood out in too many ways. My headmaster actually said to my face that I would never amount to anything, and then I was kicked out of school. I was spat in the face by my classmates. There was a lot of racism. At the time I didn’t really understand why I was being singled out, and when I would get back home and tell my parents they would make it seem as if it was nothing. They were scared I think. Imagine coming to a new country as a refugee. When you’ve finally been given permission to stay you don’t want to rock the boat, you don’t want to fight. You put your head down and get on with it. Don’t make a fuss, is the attitude I grew up with. I still carry the grudge of everything that happened inside me, and the only way I know to move on from it, is through my work. I want success I do, but more than that I want my work to be meaningful. I’m not a power hungry person. I don’t care to be the number one of anything. I just want to do what I love.

A version of this article first appeared in Extra Extra magazine issue 16 under the heading ‘Kenneth Ize on Dressing to Feel Good.’

In the three simple and, in retrospect, very carefree years I was married without children, I would often, without meaning to, draw comparisons between myself and my father, which – as I constructed them – I could not live up to. Pappy is old enough to be my grandfather. Born black in the segregated South in the 1930s, he did not know his own father, and as I realise now, he got his ideas of masculinity freestyle, from the books he read and the movies he sat through, from the uncles who showed him from an early age how to box and throw a football, and from his own highly particularised code of honour. No one showed him, though, and he did not try to learn, many of the things my friends and I spend a lot of our time doing: talking about our feelings, changing diapers, fixing the family supper. Nor would any of us have wanted him to. He was a serious and busy man, busier than I think I have ever been and somewhat frightening – and he was a provider. Never a rich man, I have only come to see in adulthood some of the small pleasures Pappy withheld from himself so that we might take them for granted.

Pappy kept one of those nylon shoe racks hanging on the back of his bedroom door. Most of the surface area, and then some, of the single story house we lived in was occupied by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that stored the thousands of volumes of literature and philosophy and management strategy he’d used to climb up out of Texas, but here, in my eyes, was the real treasure. When he was out running errands or working in his study, bent over a book or teaching the students who filed into our house to sit with him and fix their test scores, I’d slip into his bedroom and rifle through his belongings: fingering his penknives and leather-strapped watches, feeling the soft silk and woven wool of his neckties, inhaling the funky, wonderful smell of his aged leather belts – which I handled with a mix of awe and fear, the two or three times I behaved very badly, these doubled as instruments of punishment – and studying that weathered, bizarre source of power, his wallet.

But on the back of his door, in front of that nylon shoe rack, is where I always found myself standing, pulling down the enormous neon yellow and gray Air Maxes (shoes roomy enough I could stick my own sneakers into them), the perfect ecru Reeboks, styles which have come and gone many times, as well as the oxblood Alden lace-ups, the mahogany Cole Haans and the sleek black Ferragamos (the only Italian shoes he could countenance), designs that have never been outmoded. These latter pairs are the ones that, on early Friday and Saturday evenings, the times he was not working, usually after showering and shaving and putting on whatever it was he had that smelled so amazing, I would find my father in his bedroom with his grease and his brush and his rags steadily polishing, the football game or the tennis match flashing in the background. I’d come in the room and he’d greet me warmly but without stopping. He polished and cleaned all of his real shoes carefully, just as he folded and hung his slacks and his blazers as soon as he undressed, never leaving them to pile up on a chair and get wrinkled. Pappy didn’t ever speak about fashion, but I could tell even then how much care he put into the few things that he was wearing. What I couldn’t realise, not at that time, was how old these items were, that my father had stopped buying things for himself, almost entirely, as long as I’d been living.

My brother is five years older that I am. For as long as I’ve been conscious of it, whenever his feet grew I too would receive a new pair of shoes. Maybe it started when I was in fourth or fifth grade. I’d noticed a new pair of blue-and-white Air Flights on his feet, box fresh, with the orange-and-gray Nike Air tag still affixed at the lace hole, as was the style where we grew up in the early Nineties. I must have thrown a jealous tantrum, but Pappy, a well-groomed man who cared – but not overly – about how he looked and probably, now that I think of it, might have enjoyed a vacation, remained impassive. He didn’t scold me. My brother and I were sitting in the backseat and when we reached our house he kept driving. Pappy drove us all the way to Foot Locker, where he bought me an equivalent pair of Nike Air sneakers. I’m certain he couldn’t afford them. I’m ashamed of the amount of Air Jordans he has since bought me. Yet from that day on, whenever either of our feet grew, he took both my brother and me shopping.

I think I was afraid to become a father myself because I could not imagine I could make similar sacrifices. The memory of, on warm summer evenings, coming back home from the basketball courts to find my father hunched over his shoes, working them to a brilliant polish, is one of my fondest. This is how a man is: a man works; a man uses what he’s got and improves it; a man knows and understands the value of a thing, and he knows its price is not always synonymous; a man also spends a real sum from time to time – as was the case with those Aldens – but with discretion, only when it’s worth it.

It has been a long time since my feet grew several sizes larger than Pappy’s, and I couldn’t even pretend to squeeze into his Air Maxes. I’ve developed my own tastes, too, having grown fond of the kind of Italian loafers he detested. I’m slimmer; I almost never have use for a belt. In many respects, I think it’s too late for me to learn to move through the world the way my father did, and I think, on a certain level, that is what he worked so hard for. But I’m a father, too, now. I cook and I clean, I change diapers and my wife and split the expenses. My close male friends and I get together over glasses of Pauillac and tell each other about our fears and ambitions. I need this. I know I could never be the kind of solitary rock that my father was, but we are not entirely dissimilar, either. For one thing, over the years I’ve bought a lot of my own shoes, and some are expensive: glistening black A. Testonis for my wedding; Dior Homme patent leather lace-ups; suede Fratelli Rossetti loafers I found on sale in Naples; burgundy desert chukkas from Church’s; many, many pairs of Nike Air Maxes; now I laugh when my almost three-year-old daughter attempts to wear them. What she doesn’t realise – and it’s fine by me if she never does – is that, some time ago, I also stopped buying new ones.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White, and has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books.

All images courtesy of the International Center of Photography (www.icp.org).

PREFACE

What would you take with you if you were leaving home?

What would you bring if you knew you weren’t returning?

Clothes carry memories, tell stories of who we are or want to be. These tactile residues and symbols of the past help anchor us when we feel lost at sea. Because don’t we all go through life, one journey at a time, discarding some things along the way, keeping others?

The things we carry, what do they say about us?

For those forced by circumstance to leave the familiar behind, otherwise insignificant things often take on portentous meaning. An ordinary pair of sneakers becomes an emblem of a brother far away, a silver necklace connects you to your heritage, a winter coat bought cheap in a high street store has to double up as a duvet when all the beds at the nearest camp are full. Most of us don’t have to think about clothes like that; we focus on what makes us look good, or feel good. What makes us belong, or stand out. But for some, displaced by war or hardship, an everyday T-shirt, a pair of trousers or a scarf, turn into tangible material memories of times past, disappointments endured and victories won.

Reflecting our history, garments are sometimes said to be a second skin. They protect, from harsh weather but also from unforgiving looks. They help us fit in, when fitting in is a survival strategy. In the three stories that follow, how to navigate taste and identity when choice is severely limited, how to negotiate nostalgia for home with the practicalities of a new life and how to hold onto the things most dear to us while being constantly on the move becomes woefully clear.

Because the things we carry give us shape.

ABDUL-WAHED DAABOUL, AGE 21

Left Latakia, Syria in 2015

Arrived in Calw, Germany in 2015

I left Syria when I was nineteen. I was studying English at university in my hometown Latakia; I was in my second semester. In Syria you have to go to the army when you’re eighteen. You can delay it while you study, but when you finish you have to go. I was thinking to myself, ‘What do I do?’ I didn’t want to kill anybody. I decided on August 2nd that I would leave the country, and on August 20th I did.

I left with another boy from Syria, he was a friend from university. We went from Latakia to Lebanon with a bus, then to Turkey with a big ship. We arrived in Mersin, in south Turkey, and then continued to Izmir. That was a sixteen-hour bus journey. In Izmir we met a man who took people to Greece. We went to Mytilene with a boat, and the first thing I did when I arrived was to call my family. They didn’t know where I was; I didn’t want to worry them.

I had to get to a refugee camp in Athens and the buses only took families with children so I ended up walking twenty kilometres. I joined a group of others who were walking too. We ended up being five refugees from Syria and two from Iraq, six adults and one child. On the way we met a Greek man who took us the last bit in his car; it’s easier to get help when you’re travelling with a child. We took the boat to Athens, but I had to wait ten days to get my papers from the police. I slept in the street because I was illegal; I couldn’t stay in a hotel without papers and the camps were very bad. I didn’t want to stay there.

I travelled from Greece to Macedonia and then to Serbia with a bus, it took six hours. Then I took the train to Hungary – that took twenty hours. It was so bad; we must have been a thousand persons. All refugees, from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria… It was very bad. I had to be very careful travelling through Europe, especially in Hungary. The border had barbed wire; we had to cut it with a knife to get through. We got caught and were all taken to the police station; they wanted to fingerprint us. But I had heard that if I got fingerprinted, I couldn’t carry on to Germany, which was where I was headed. The police was… was… was… not so good. They wanted to fingerprint us all to get money from the European Union. In Hungary I walked for nine hours. I was scared. The police were very bad with the people. I got to the border with Austria, and then I took a train for two days to Passau in Germany. From Passau I went to Munich, then to Nuremberg, then to Ellwangen and finally to Calw. I arrived on September 11; the whole trip took me twenty-one days. I had to wait a lot on my journey but I was never bored. I met so many people from different countries and cultures. I learnt a lot.

Before I left, I gave something of mine to each one of my closest friends: I gave my favourite bracelet to one; he’s in Belgium now. I gave one of my scarves away to another friend. I gave a cigarette to another: I wrote ‘August 20, 2015’ on it and our names, and we smoked it together. It was the last thing we did and we both relaxed; it was really special. It was cool. All I brought with me from home were the clothes I could fit in my backpack and my smart phone. I brought one jacket, one pair of jeans and two pairs of shorts, two polo shirts and two normal T-shirts, but only one pair of shoes because the bag was small. I brought antibiotics and paracetamol in case I got sick. I had a friend who travelled to Germany before me; he gave me advice about what to bring and how to deal with the people. He told me to have a small bag on my person always, where I keep all my valuables. In it I kept my money, passport, smart phone and charger and a watch that my father gave me. When I slept I kept it under my T-shirt, which was lucky because my backpack was stolen in the German camp. All my clothes were taken: my jacket, a T-shirt that my best friend gave me before I left Syria with ‘Lamborghini’ written on it. They were my favourite clothes. When my backpack was stolen I had to buy everything new: I bought a jacket and a pair of jeans for €50. In the camps they gave clothes away for free but I couldn’t take them. I don’t know why. Maybe because I had some money, and I felt I should buy my own clothes. There were so many others without money; they should get their clothes for free, not me.

I wear the same clothes now as I did back home: T-shirts, jeans, sneakers. In Syria I got my clothes from H&M, Nike, Adidas. I really like Nike AirMax and the new Adidas shoe too but they’re too expensive for me; €200 for a pair of sneakers! My body type is different to Europeans though. I’m fat. I have broad shoulders. I’m 1.87 metres tall so it’s difficult for me to find clothes that fit. I like normal jeans, without lots of details on them. Simple jeans. I don’t like tight jeans, because I’m fat. I like polo T-shirts from Ralph Lauren, Lacoste, Tommy. In Germany I have them in red, white, black, blue. In Syria I have yellow and grey too. I love T-shirts with sentences on them; I have one from Nike that says, ‘Kiss My Airs.’ And another my friend in America gave me, it says ‘Surprise Motherfucker!’ and another that says ‘Nobody’s perfect. My name is Nobody.’ [Laughs] I really like T-shirts with Disney figures, but I haven’t found any of those in Germany. My favourite clothes now are my AirMax that my brother sent me from Turkey. And a red Nike polo shirt from my friend in Switzerland. And a traditional Palestinian shawl from my mother – she sent it to me through a friend from Syria who lives in Germany now but I don’t want to use it. I want to keep it perfect.

This piece was created in collaboration with ‘An Unpredictable Expression of Human Potential,’ curated by Hicham Khalidi for Part of Act II, Sharjah Biennial 13, Tamawuj, Beirut, Lebanon 2017.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s editor-in-chief and founder.

Rinko Kawauchi is a Japanese photographer.

A FEW MONTHS AGO, whistleblower Christopher Wylie gave a speech at the annual summit BoF Voices.¹ He discussed how his former employer Cambridge Analytica used Facebook users’ preferences for fashion brands to profile them according to key personality traits and later target them with political messaging. According to his matrix, fans of American denim brands such as Wrangler and Lee scored low on openness and excitement-seeking and were therefore more likely to respond to pro-Trump content, while aficionados of labels such as Abercrombie and Fitch and Kenzo displayed characteristics that were likely to make them more liberal-leaning. ‘Fashion is powerful,’ he stated and went on to note, in a Benjaminian² stance, that totalitarian regimes are usually associated with recognisable and strong aesthetics: ‘You can easily imagine what a Maoist looks like. You can imagine what a Nazi looks like. You can imagine what an ISIS fighter looks like.’

Like myself, Wylie did a PhD in sociology of fashion. It’s not obvious from his speeches: his approach is at odds with that of many fashion theorists. We warn students against treating fashion as a language where every signifier points to an intelligible signified and where affinities for brands or styles can stand for personality traits. Our general consensus is that aesthetic products have become unmoored from their original meanings. I have heard homophobic views from people who looked like they came straight out of the 1980s New York club scene; a growing coterie of young neo-Nazis is sporting a hipster look, traditionally associated with liberal values, consisting of skinny jeans, Converse trainers, tote bags and beards;³ someone dressed like a Punk may well be a Thatcherite: this is how we explain postmodernism in the classroom.

Cambridge Analytica’s model is based on the opposite premise: that fashion has solid, unequivocal meanings that can be used to profile and target you with political messaging according to your clothing choices; that it is a rational universe where ‘Wrangler ergo Trump’ correlations can be drawn. But can it really hold ground today? Of course, one might argue, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: just look what happened with the US election. But then is there really a way of knowing if Wylie and his cohorts played a significant role in it? Couldn’t it be that Cambridge Analytica was merely playing its clients, just like it was playing electorates?

Much like Newton’s laws, Wylie’s matrix can only fully work in an imaginary situation. In physics, it is a setup immune to external forces where a body is always either at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line. Such a predicament, however, is a mathematical abstraction that is impossible in the real world where various factors, such as the centrifugal force of the Earth’s rotation, air resistance and friction, come into play. In cultural terms, an equivalent of physics’ inertial frame of reference would be a hermetically sealed social situation; a static monocultural setup where narratives are coherent and linear, meanings are fixed, and brands (and, for that matter, politicians) stand for clearly defined values.

In reality, of course, such situations do not exist, and brand narratives are constantly re-interpreted and subverted. Let’s imagine, for argument’s sake, that ‘straight white men from Alabama’ whom Wylie invoked in his speech do indeed exist in a pure and adulterated state and see Wrangler as equivalent to conservative values and of putting America first. Conversely, someone from America’s supposed counterpole, Russia, will likely associate Wrangler and the like with liberal and progressive values. In a 1970s poem, still widely cited today, that humorously depicts St Petersburg’s hippy scene, one of the characters swears ‘by the holy firm Lee’⁴ which is framed as the symbol of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. A Russian Lee fan, then, is unlikely to score low on excitement-seeking, unlike his or her American counterpart. So, an Alabamian and a Russian will read Lee and Wrangler in polar opposite ways.

The problem is, pure and uncontaminated identities are exceedingly rare in the global late capitalist world, other than in the imaginaries of nationalist ideologues. Alabamians marry Russians; their children speak with a British accent because of Peppa Pig.⁵ Kenzo fans wear Wrangler. Anyone with a hybrid identity (not 100% straight, not 100% white, not 100% Alabamian) is likely to hold multiple, potentially conflicting, views on a lot of things, often at the same time. We are implicated in systems of exchange with so many touchpoints that our horizons of understanding are permanently shifting. In this cultural indeterminacy, a brand can be both conservative and liberal, as its meanings will be read and enacted from multiple subject positions at once, even by the very same person. As the writer James Meek, with whom I had an email exchange discussing the Cambridge Analytica case, wrote to me, ‘conservative patriotism and free love and white fear of marginalisation have all united in Trump, under the American flag, in Lee and Wrangler.’

It would be tempting to conclude that brands have no meaning at all, but this is not a point of view that I am here to defend. Brands do have meanings, but they are always in flux and are most certainly not shaped by any one group of people. Instead, they are rearticulated every time a brand is worn, pictured or mentioned. ‘The brand progresses or emerges in a series of loops, an ongoing process of (product) differentiation and (brand) integration,’ posits Celia Lury.⁶ An earlier Vestoj article unpacked how brands such as New Balance and Adidas were appropriated by alt-right movements,⁷ showing a brilliant, if terrifying, example of how such new readings constantly emerge.

This ambiguous world of ever-shifting brand meanings might be resilient to the likes of Cambridge Analytica and its profiling, but it is certainly more difficult to navigate. When aesthetics do not have solid and fixed links to ideas, Wylie’s maxim ‘you can easily imagine what a Nazi, or an ISIS fighter, looks like’ no longer applies. And then, to paraphrase an ad that warns passengers of plain-clothed inspectors on London public transport, ‘spotting one is “easy”: they look just like you.’⁸

However, one thing that Wylie was saying is indeed worthy of further analysis. He suggested that every consumer is also a voter, and implied it is the responsibility of the brand to communicate certain messages that might sway their vote. This was possibly the most important takeaway of his speech, but also one that rarely got cited or reflected upon.

Two years ago, tens of thousands of people within Moscow-based opposition assembled at a rally opposing government corruption. It ended with an unprecedented number of arrests – the highest at any rally in post-Soviet history, according to BBC Russia;⁹ many of them were violent. On that day, my old Muscovite friend Sasha Boyarskaya, a creative consultant for Nike and an Instagram influencer with tens of thousands of followers, posted two photographs of herself. In one, she was wearing a gas mask.¹⁰ In the other one, the gas mask was hanging off her neck, and she had a flag in her hands. ‘I hope we all have a good day today,’ she said in the caption.¹¹ This was complete with a hashtag that I read, while scrolling down fast, as the Russian word for ‘revolution.’

Sasha used to be an avid and vocal supporter of the protest movement at its inception in 2011, but in the latter years I hadn’t seen her post much on the matter. I was moved by her renewed interest in the protests and by her bravery: she had given birth only a few months earlier, and it was obvious that participating in rallies in early 2017 was anything but a safe affair. She could easily end up detained, beaten, and parted with her very small son.

I scrolled back to take a closer look at her photo and then realised that the hashtag I had hurriedly read as ‘#revolution’ said, in fact, ‘#revolutionair,’ as in Nike Air Max. Her post was a reference to Nike Air Max Day, a running event sponsored by the sportswear conglomerate and happening on the very same day as the rallies. Sasha is a very skilled social media strategist. She knew exactly what she was doing.

‘I am stunned,’ I confessed to my husband when recounting the episode to him that evening, as I watched the arrest poll grow. ‘How cynical – taking a political narrative that will land real people who uphold it in jail and using it to flog trainers.’

‘Yes, but don’t you think for some people brand narratives are an entry point to political ones?’ he replied.

He had a point. In The Culture of New Capitalism, sociologist Richard Sennett asks ‘do people shop for politicians the way they shop for clothes?’ and invites readers to ‘consider the citizen as a consumer of politics, faced with pressures to buy.’¹² This was published in 2006, the same year as cultural anthropologist Adam Arvidsson’s text Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture, where he argues that brands are ‘spun into the social fabric as a ubiquitous medium for the construction of a common social world,’ creating a ‘complex web of meanings and intensities’ that invites certain actions and attitudes: ‘Brands do not so much stand for products, as much as they provide a part of the context in which products are used […] with a particular brand I can act, feel, and be in a particular way.’¹³ In other words, brands shape a certain ‘structure of feeling’, as per Marxist theorist Raymond Williams’ definition.¹⁴ This ‘framework’ then informs our decisions that go well beyond consumption in its traditional sense. There is no reason not to imagine that such decisions may include our votes and other political acts. In the years that have passed since the publication of those texts, such ‘webs of meaning and intensities’ created by brands have enmeshed us even more closely than before, as our relationships with brands have got more intimate due to new media and to ever evolving marketing strategies aimed at turning brands into friends.

Before she even got employed by Nike, Sasha had a Nike swoosh tattoed on the left-hand side of her chest, right where it would be if she was wearing a T-shirt. Her body has thus become a Nike garment; she literally has the brand under her skin. She isn’t the only one – brand tattoos are a phenomenon that has been studied academically.¹⁵ This illustrates the extremely intimate relationships with consumer brands characteristic of late capitalism. For a lot of us, these relationships are more solid than those with political parties. Brand narratives are often more digestible, more shareable, more memefiable and more relatable than those of political campaigns, and they may well have more say in shaping political attitudes.

I have discussed campaigns such as Diesel’s ‘Make Love, Not Walls’¹⁶ and, more recently Gilette’s ‘Toxic Masculinity’¹⁷ ads in cultural studies seminars at Chelsea College of Arts and London College of Fashion. My students usually correctly identify them as tapping into political narratives that have a certain ‘cool’ cachet due to being popular with young and progressive groups of people, and most are disappointed to see them ‘riding the hype’ and using these narratives for profit. But then the discussion usually takes a slightly different turn: yes, someone says, we can safely assume that some anti-Trump consumers who have not yet bought into Diesel may become interested in the brand after having seen this ad; but what about people who haven’t yet decided which way to vote but are already fans of Diesel? In a culture oversaturated with brand narratives, ‘we end up living in a well nigh all-encompassing brand-space,’ Arvidsson argues.¹⁸ It is easy to form brand allegiances before political ones, and, in that case, there is a chance one’s brand allegiances will inform political preferences. Even though campaigning for Democrats was not Diesel’s intention – its intention is to flog as many jeans as possible – it might be the outcome of its messaging.

Sasha is a skilled social media strategist, and her comment ‘I hope we all have a good day’ under the second image, paired with ‘do more than just run 5k today #justdoitsunday’ was, on second thought, probably deliberately ambivalent (or at least I’d like to think so). She knew very well that a lot of her friends would get arrested that day and was weaving their stories, however subtly and probably imperceptibly to many, into her message; giving protest imagery a touch of Nike. It’s a sad state of affairs, one might say, if political ideas are more persuasive if they come from a consumer brand; but isn’t this how late capitalism works: not only is everything branded, but brands are an access point to anything, helping consumers to make sense of the world well beyond themselves. This is what Wylie was talking about: brands have the power – and, given their economic resources, the platform – to send certain messages that may remain unheard if they are coming from elsewhere; to make them part of the vernacular. Of course, brands can capitalise on political messages to build relationships with their audiences, but the reverse is also true: they can similarly capitalise on their already existing relationships with audiences to get political messages across.

Not that their marketing executives will necessarily want to do it, as Wylie seemed to be hoping – why would they? – but, as the earlier section suggests, there is a possibility of it happening even despite their intentions, as brand meanings and messages are never fixed, never straightforward, and never in the hands of the brand’s team alone.

Jana Melkumova-Reynolds is a scholar, writer and consultant based in London. She lectures at London College of Fashion and Chelsea College of Art, and is currently a ESRC-funded PhD candidate at King’s College London.

1. https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/video/cambridge-analytica-weaponised-fashion-brands-to-elect-trump-says-christopher-wylie ↩

2. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm ↩

3. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/heil-hipster-the-young-neo-nazis-trying-to-put-a-stylish-face-on-hate-64736/ ↩

4. This poem, by the singer and songwriter Boris Grebenschikov, is available (in Russian) here http://www.guelman.ru/artists/mg/kniga-prozy/view_print/  ↩

5. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/peppa-pig-children-american-english-accent-cartoon-network-a8777581.html ↩

6. Celia Lury, Brands:The Logos of the global economy. London: Routledge, 2004 ↩

7. http://vestoj.com/operation-new-balance/ ↩

8. For a brilliant discussion of invisibility as a new strategy of extreme ideologies such as the alt-right, see the article mentioned in the previous footnote. ↩

9. https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-39402540 ↩

10. https://www.instagram.com/p/BSGcj26jz1i/ ↩

11. https://www.instagram.com/p/BSGkHA2DsQT/ ↩

12. Richard Sennett, The Culture of new capitalism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006 ↩

13. Adam Arvidsson, Brands:Meaning and value in media culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2006 ↩

14. See, for instance, http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100538488  ↩

15. A. Orendt and P. Gagné, ‘Corporate Logo Tattoos and the Commodification of the Body,’ Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 38 (4), pp. 493-517, 2009 ↩

16. https://www.adweek.com/creativity/diesel-and-david-lachapelle-offer-joyous-resistance-with-the-flamboyant-make-love-not-walls-campaign/ ↩

17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=UYaY2Kb_PKI ↩

18. Adam Arvidsson, Brands: Meaning and value in media culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2006 ↩

Heaven’s Gate was just the latest incarnation of a spiritual New Age movement created in the mid 1970s by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles, later known as Do and Ti, or Bo and Peep, respectively. The two first met at a hospital where Applewhite went to seek treatment for his sexual and psychological issues. A successful academic with a wife and two children, Applewhite was a closeted homosexual. Deeply troubled, he obtained a divorce and was fired by St. Thomas University for having an affair with a student. Thought he didn’t find the ‘cure’ he was looking for at the hospital, he instead found an inseparable companion in Nettles. They first operated a metaphysical centre in Oregon and then led a semi-nomadic life for years, gathering followers and refining their ideology by merging New Age spirituality and elements from Christian theology with a belief in intelligent extraterrestrial life rooted in Gnosticism as well as popular culture. What tied these elements together, perhaps unsurprisingly considering Applewhite’s problematic relationship with his sexuality, was a stark refusal of the body. Fleshy, terrestrial life was looked at with disdain, in contrast to the extraterrestrial ascension that awaited the group members. After Nettles died of cancer in 1985, the urgency to reunite with her spirit on the spacecraft probably strengthened Applewhite’s belief in an exclusively spiritual afterlife, cementing the idea of the human body as mere ‘container’ in the group’s theology.¹

As in most religions, detachment from the body was achieved through bodily and sartorial practices. These included identical diets, grooming – all members sported a buzz cut – and clothing, which were meant to reinforce a unified group mentality. Heaven’s Gate’s uniforms changed slightly over time, but were consistently unisex and monochromatic: early images of Applewhite and Nettles show them wearing all black, while in a 1992 promotional video series all members wore grey collarless shirts. The dress code was to ‘emphasise modesty, comfort and utilitarian value’ while also reorienting the members ‘toward the Next Level,’² the group’s term for their extraterrestrial afterlife. Heaven’s Gate’s image for the ‘Gray,’ the alien species that were supposed to grant them access to their next life, was indeed represented as a bald, gender-neutral being dressed in a skin-tight, silver uniform. But cult members did not limit themselves to the adoption of clothing that concealed gender markers. In fact, after Nettle’s death, Applewhite encouraged them to view their human bodies themselves as garments:

‘We use the reference [“of vehicle”] to this body that we’re wearing – this flesh and bones – we use the term “vehicle” because it helps us separate from the body […] This is just a suit of clothes that I’m wearing, and at times it can be an encumbrance for me. It can be something I don’t want to identify with.’³

This belief partly explains why some male adepts went so far as to undergo castration in an attempt to eliminate the urges of the flesh. It probably also made the 1997 ritual suicide, or ‘graduation’ in Heaven’s Gate’s terminology, more acceptable for the group. All members seemed indeed relieved at the idea of leaving their containers behind. However, the media coverage of the event reveals a widespread scepticism towards the group’s religious ideology and a quasi-morbid fascination with the appearance of its members, in particular with their ‘graduation’ uniforms. One article reports a neighbour saying that ‘they looked like computer nerds,’ with the journalist adding that ‘they resemble no one quite as much as the early American Puritans in their plainness.’⁴ A different reporter called them ‘cybermonks and nuns who all dressed in black and wore their hair close-cropped,’⁵ while a journalist writing for the Los Angeles edition of Daily News suggested that they embodied ‘the wealthy casualness of modern geek chic’ and mimicked a celebrity journalist by observing, ‘And those all-black uniforms? As we saw at the Academy Awards last week, same-color shirts, ties and pants are hot, hot, hot this season.’⁶

The ties of the group with popular culture were indeed strong. Many members used to be avid fans of The X-Files, Star Wars and Star Trek – Heaven’s Gate’s black shirts featured Away Team badges, a reference to captain Kirk’s exploration team. These phenomena resonated ‘with gnostic myths of ascension’ and occasionally drew from ‘prophecies of millennial doom,’ as Star Wars creator George Lucas’ keen interest in the work of Gnosticism scholar Joseph Campbell suggests.⁷ As noted by many a reporter, Heaven’s Gate members also dwelled in California’s burgeoning tech culture: the group enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle thanks to their website design firm, unironically called Higher Source Contract Enterprises. While living in almost total isolation, then, the affiliates were very much in touch with 1990s American culture. In fact, the group’s ideology was a direct product of the ongoing merging of popular culture, spirituality and consumerism in the United States at the time.

In particular, it was the Nike trainers worn for the ritual suicide in 1997 that managed to capture the collective imagination in popular culture. As a brand which enjoyed cult status – pun intended – Nike’s signature swoosh was one of the most recognised logos all over the world. A 1998 article reports that, according to a research conducted by the company, its logo was recognised by 97% of Americans and that each American spent an average of $20 a year on Nike products.⁸ However, because the brand was so easily identified, its reputation was more readily subject to bad publicity. Between 1997 and 1998 Nike shoes were spotted on the Heaven’s Gate members, and on one of the victims of a school shooting that took place in Oregon in May 1998. A Nike baseball cap was also regularly worn by felon O.J. Simpson, a brand ambassador not as desirable as Michael Jordan, who at the time had signed a multi-million dollar deal with the company.

The swoosh became so ubiquitous, and the company so profitable, that satirist Will Durst imagined a meeting at Nike headquarters in which marketing executives discussed how to capitalise on the Heaven’s Gate ritual suicide:

‘Nike is still holding damage-control meetings on focus-group surveys to figure out if that whole Heaven’s Gate thing was good publicity or bad. “Well, on the one hand, the swoosh was on the cover of everything. On the other hand, it did tend to put a reverse spin on the whole ‘Just Do It’ thing. What we need to do is find the new cults. Quietly. Emerging cults. Cutting-edge cults. Post-grunge cults … And figure out a way where they don’t die in the end.”’⁹

In a twisted turn of events, time proved Durst right. The cult of Heaven’s Gate has entered commodity culture courtesy of 1990s nostalgia. Only two years after the mass suicide, objects that belonged to the affiliates were auctioned off by county officials in San Diego, including clothing and Nike trainers. Memorabilia were bought by ex members, by the curator of the Museum of Death in Los Angeles as well as by ordinary people – some hoping to up-sell them on the internet as ‘there are some weird people out there.’¹⁰ Internet in particular has contributed to the cult’s popularity in recent years. One need not adventure in its deepest recesses to find Heaven’s Gate Away Team patches and t-shirts available for purchase, or to stumble across Creators and Destroyers, a brand created by a religious cult aficionado that offers a ‘cult starter’s pack,’ Heaven’s Gate DVDs and Applewhite posters. A user on Yahoo-owned fashion site Polyvore even made achieving the Heaven’s Gate look much easier thanks to their style board, which of course includes a Nike top with the famous ‘Just Do It’ slogan. Durst’s parodic scenario suddenly does not seem so far-fetched.

In his seminal text Modernity At Large, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai observes that nostalgia is an essential element of modern merchandising and marketing. Specifically, he discusses the notion of ‘ersatz’ or ‘armchair nostalgia’, which he defines as ‘nostalgia without lived experience or collective historical memory.’¹¹ Following this reasoning, symbols that once held powerful meanings are consumed as empty signs or simulacra; this is true for Heaven’s Gate T-shirts as much as it is for the punk or grunge elements that are seasonally regurgitated on the runways.

What is ironic in this case is how a uniform intended to favour the wearer’s detachment from the body has been recontextualised as fashionable commodity – though perhaps not particularly surprising considering the popularity of 1990s-inspired normcore on runways and streets. The Heaven’s Gate look is, after all, a cult twist on the uniform of a suburban dad. The memory of Heaven’s Gate, then, paradoxically survives through the loss of its original meaning, and its very survival reflects the broader mechanisms of contemporary, especially American, culture. The cult has acquired its own niche spot, located somewhere between an MTV special, a Spice Girls doll and the umpteenth Friends re-run.

Alessandro Esculapio is a writer and PhD student at the University of Brighton, UK.

1. J.R. Lewis, “Legitimating Suicide: Heaven’s Gate and New Age Ideology,” in C. Partridge (ed.) UFO Religions, Florence, GB: Routledge, 2012, pp. 103-28. ↩

2. B.E. Zeller, Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion, New York: NYU Press, 2014, p. 142. ↩

3. Excerpt from the group’s 1991-2 satellite program, quoted in B.E. Zeller, Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion, New York, NYU Press, 2014, pp.118-9. ↩

4. R. Rodriguez, “Lost In Paradise: A Journey Through Heaven’s Gate,” Philadelphia Tribune, April 11, 1997. ↩

5. J. Carlin, “Who’s Next Through Heaven’s Gate?”, The Independent, March 30, 1997. ↩

6. G. Gaslin, “Cult of Popular Culture: Heaven’s Gate Suicide Earmarked With Mixed Bag of Media Iconography,” in Daily News, Los Angeles edition, April 2, 1997. ↩

7. C. Lehmann, “The Deep Roots of Heaven’s Gate,” Harper’s Magazine, June 1997, p. 15. ↩

8. T. Egan, “Downsizing the Swoosh: Nike’s Ubiquitous Logo Is Suffering From A Serious Case of Overexposure”, The Spectator, November 21, 1998. ↩

9. W. Durst, ‘Nike Knocking On Heaven’s Door,’ The Progressive, June 1997, p.12 ↩

10. One of the bidders quoted in “Suicide Cult’s Possessions Auctioned Off”, The New York Times, November 22, 1999. ↩

11. A. Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, MINN.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 78. ↩