All Black Everything

History of the Italian Blackshirts

French filmmaker Jean Genet once said “fascism is theater,” but in 2017, the stage more closely resembles a reality TV set: Donald Trump, our mewling star, boasts both an arsenal of props (the bulging, important-looking folders full of blank pages) and a captive audience (the size of which is in dispute) — but what about the costumes? Fascism is an ideology in which appearance is everything — one need only look at past dictators to note that aesthetics remain a crucial part of the show. This week, we’ll look at the visual markers of…