Fashioning the nation in the age of populism

Dress and fashion are both an important site and an idiom through which political conflicts, over cultural membership, such as national and ethnic belonging, are played out. In this article, I use Hungary as a case study to map the various ways in which fashion is used today in populist regimes to delineate the symbolic boundaries of the nation by generating powerful material and visual definitions of belonging, identity, sovereignty, community, traditional craftsmanship and shared heritage. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews I conducted in Hungary between 2017 and 2022 with the owners and designers of independent fashion labels that each stress the importance of incorporating ‘traditional’ Hungarian motifs into contemporary everyday wear. I show how these cultural producers normalize radical nationalism and imagine the nation through consumer communities, highlighting the significance of symbolic economies for populist rule. My analysis develops a relational and practice-oriented approach to consumer nationalism, expanding scholarship on the everyday mechanisms through which the national extends into the economic realm.