Fred Perry kills its yellow-tipped black polo shirt, denounces fascist appropriators

Thanks to covid, I haven’t had to wear khakis for a while. Even on some distant day when I have to return to the office for more than 1 day a week, it’ll be business 501 jeans for me.

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I did it semi-jokingly at one point and was attacked, and found out someone I know had their tooth chipped in a very similar situation. I’m in the US.

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Where my Bob’s fans at?

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So black with twin yellow stripes is the new brown shirt? Christ I live in an isolated area…thank god. Still I’m gonna head back to the jungle as soon as the international flights open up.

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I wish I was in good enough shape to wear a Nehru jacket and not looking ridiculous. I loved those jackets when I saw it in movies as a kid and still love them today. Bond movies and many TV series of that time, mainly British ones (UFO as an example), are of great inspiration.

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am i the only one thinking about how these things will just be selling for a ton of money on ebay now?

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Cancel culture!! The shirt the libs don’t want you to wear!! Buy it now $550

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exactly. I said this on another thread, but I bought some matt furie enamel pins including one of Pepe, thinking I was encouraging him taking back his characters. Then that jerk richard spencer was wearing the exact same pin and bragging about it right before he got punched in that video. I’m afraid to get rid of it and could never sell it on ebay cuz some nazi would probably scoop it up.

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Do you wear them with khakis or with long cotton “casual” cargo type shorts? Bonus points for Sperry Topsider boat shoes.

If you wear these in combo, you may be an undiagnosed douche canoe (My parents sent me to a prep school as a kiddo, and as one of the not so rich not “hill” people, I can honestly say that my skater kid wear was looked down upon quite heartily by richy-rich douche canoes whose uniform was the above. Made it pretty difficult to take the attempted bullies very seriously though…)

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I’m thinking that some entrepreneurial Proud Boys will grey-import shirts from the UK. But perhaps Fred Perry hope that their least welcome customers will simply switch to something else.

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As somebody commented on the Independent news site yesterday;
Why not keep selling them, but donate all profits to Black Lives Matter, or some other worthy cause, diametrically opposed to the neo-nazi hobbyhorses?

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A bit late, though. Fred Perry has been associated with Nazis here in Germany since the 80ies, and the brand did fuck all about this. Of course not everyone who wore their apparel was an outright Nazi, but at least indifferent enough not to be bothered when that association was mentioned to them.

Yep, they’ve also mostly been silently tolerating this for decades.

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They have? Lonsdale I was aware of (and of course the excreable Thor Steinar and such) but not Fred Perry.

It’s weird and quite ironic anyway that all the Nazis are wearing British clothes. I mean, I know that it came hand in hand with the import of skinhead culture but still, you’d think they’d buy German.

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“we are working with our lawyers to pursue any unlawful use of our brand”

We are all fighting the good fight here, but am I the only one who is slightly uneasy reading this? Unauthorized Shirt, to channel Cory Doctorow. We already don’t own books, games, movies, software - just the licenses allowing us to use it within the lines drawn by the corporation, to have the product withdrawn and/or being held liable if we dare use it differently. You know these lawyers are looking at license agreements and DRM in other industries to try to see whether they can license-limit the use of their shirts.

When laws are changed to allow content filtering online, ban the use of encryption, penalize the use of certain speech, it generally starts with “but the Nazis!”, pointing to right wing groups that all of us “good people” want to have curtailed. Then, these laws end up not being used against nazis at all, but against copyright infringers, and then left wing protesters, and other malcontents we might agree with.

And it’s all in the name of symbol politics, because a corporation doesn’t want their marketing to be tainted. I really don’t care what shirt a nazi wears, or if they wear any shirt at all; the shirt not the danger here…

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Well I mean we’re all just a bunch of walking billboards for these vampires anyway… they’ve just remixed the meaning behind the logo which I guess has its roots in Looking out for Number 1 because Forget all you losers, I’m the winner.

Freedom of expression is one thing, but when they try to take on that Eurocentrist Tintin that’s when they’ve gone too far.

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I remember a little shop in Stuttgart that has a little glass display of iron on patches like No Nazis and Nazis Not Allowed… and just behind the curtain and around the corner there was all the Fred Perry and Lonsdale a Proud Boy could dream of.
Ladies Night was playing over the speakers and they all were getting into character and putting on their fiercest bad self looks and were ready to wow the passerby with their moxie and overall stage presence.
T’was a sight to behold.

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(IANA Cultural Historian disclaimer)

There’s a direct familial relationship between fashions popularized by the mods and what we saw racist skinhead movements wearing in the 80s and 90s. This is why the skin uniform includes things like bomber jackets, Fred Perrys, Dickie’s work pants, and Doc Martens.

Skins evolved more or less directly from mods, and as movements have always been a bit violent (compare the mod/rocker tensions Quadrophenia to the plot of “Rumble in Brighton” by the Stray Cats and note their proximity) and working-class, but overt, far-right racism and nationalism was an add-on to the skinhead movement in the late 70s and early 80s as disenfranchised white skins bought into the propaganda from the National Front and other right-wing groups that blamed England’s economic woes on immigrants.

Meanwhile, other political factions of skins tacked far-left in part as a reaction to the right’s usurping of Skin culture and iconography. This at least partially explains why shops that sold “skinhead” paraphernalia like Docs and FPs were the selfsame ones that had anti-Nazi and antiracist patches and pins under the glass at the front counter.

It doesn’t explain why FP and other brands didn’t do the same sort of rejection of the far-right in the 70s and 80s though. Maybe the Internet demands higher-visibility actions?

[edit for typos]

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We’ve got plenty of our own fash here who will do that for them

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I would propose growth of Nazism itself as the reason for that. It was fringe nut jobs all through the 70s and 80s. We all knew they existed and that they had clubhouses in the woods, but they didn’t affect much. Now one of them is President of The United States and their clubhouse is white.

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No one would buy them. The people who support those causes wouldn’t want to be mistaken for a Proud Boy, and the Proud Boys wouldn’t buy ‘em anymore. Much better to not make them, which both solves the uniform problem, and doesn’t create waste.