Move over, #Resistance merchandise. There’s a new or, rather, resurrected style in town.
In 1970, journalist Tom Wolfe coined the term “radical chic” to mock New York’s upper-class obsession with the Black Panthers. The group was militant, and its fans were posh. Elite liberals wanted to support the black power cause in a way that fit their own image, in a way that was fashionable. Thus began radical chic.
Wolfe meant to use “radical chic” as a disparaging term, to lampoon white liberals like composer Leonard Bernstein, who threw an oddly bourgeois party for members of the Black Panthers in New York’s Upper East Side.
Now some people want to reclaim the phrase, and one historian found its path to redemption in the brutal revolutionary Fidel Castro.
Last week, the New York Times credited Castro with the genesis of radical chic, calling the Cuban communist “a young celebrity” who descended on New York City in 1959 “like Sinatra headlining in Vegas.” Historian Tony Perrottet wrote that “it was a milestone in the history of fashion.”
Citing fashion historian Sonya Abrego, Perrottet argued that “radical chic” was developed years before Wolfe named it. The movement began with Castro, and the Black Panthers borrowed its style from the Cubans. But radical chic, the historians argue, isn’t a pejorative.
“‘Radical chic’ is a term that seems so 20th century,” Abrego said. “It was once very negative, referring to a style that developed organically, but has been appropriated as a fashionable look without any further political commentary or personal risk.”
A German professor of art studies, Johan Frederik Hartle, made a similar claim in a quarterly cultural journal. In “Radical Chic? Yes We Are!” he argued that the term is inoffensive because politics should be paired with aesthetics. Hartle quoted literary theorist Kenneth Burke: “Even the most practical revolutionaries will be found to have manifested their ideas in the aesthetic sphere.”
Sure, Fidel Castro and the Black Panthers are allowed to pair fashion with politics. But that doesn’t make their ideas any better. Castro may have worn fun hats and an unruly beard, but he also ruthlessly shot and imprisoned his political opposition and held his once-prosperous country back so that today it is decades behind its neighbors. It should horrify the radical chic-sters that he imprisoned and shot thousands of LGBT people, while heading up a repressive regime that still exports its brand of oppression to Venezuela to this day.
The Black Panthers copied the Cubans’ berets and popularized the Afro and the black leather jacket in a way that celebrities such as Beyoncé still copy today. The trend-setting group, which some characterize as more violent in spirit than in action, was nevertheless characterized by police-aimed and intraparty violence.
Why would people in the 21st century want to celebrate the aesthetics of an anti-progressive leader and a militant group that copied his style? Probably for the same failing Wolfe called out in “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.”
“Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in style,” Wolfe wrote. “In its heart, it is part of Society and its traditions.”
