FASHWAVE

Fashwave is a portmanteau of “fascism” and “vaporwave,” the latter being a popular musical and visual style in the 2010s. Vaporwave was popularized on the Internet and is associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer and pop culture, “and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades. Visually, it incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, anime, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes.” ¹ Fashwave is also referred to as Trumpwave because it often references Donald Trump.

The alt-right has co-opted this musical and visual aesthetic, creating mixes on the music hosting website Bandcamp that sound virtually indistinguishable from actual songs made by vaporwave artists aside from jarring song titles such as Demographic Decline, Team White, Death to Traitors, and the occasional sample of an Adolf Hitler rant. ¹ Visually, fashwave images feature Hitler, swastikas, and Greco-Roman statues (which have been symbols of European purity and idealized masculinity for the far-right since Hitler and Mussolini) washed over with neon gradients and treated with a Photoshop glitch effect.

The appropriation of vaporwave by the alt-right is an attempt to brand the movement and make it appealing to younger audiences with the veneer of hipness from an appropriated Internet-era aesthetic. Fashwave’s cheerful retro-futuristic nostalgia and neon color palette soften the vitriolic messages it contains. One poster on 4chan's /pol/ channel, its unofficial alt-right forum that prides itself on its political incorrectness, described fashwave as being a “trap to make our ideas seem friendly and approachable." ³

The alt-right associates fashwave with both the future on the one hand, and nostalgia for the 1980s on the other. Fashwave represents their vision for a futuristic all-white utopia, and also a longing for the Reagan years, once described by alt-right leader Richard Spencer as "halcyon days, as the last days of white America." The vague juxtaposition between ancient civilization, 1980s pop culture, and futurism reveals the far right’s escapism from the present, a present where they believe West has already fallen to a host of foreign invaders and Jewish overloads. “Thus, we see the tragedy of the alt-right—it has no legible end; even when it tries to articulate a vision for the future, it relies on recycled 80s tropes and ultimately looks more or less like a barbaric version of status quo.” ⁴