Groves, Andrew 2025. Preprint: Fabricated Resistance: Massimo Osti, Surveillance Masculinity, and the Politics of Tactical Dress. Fashion Theory.
| Title | Preprint: Fabricated Resistance: Massimo Osti, Surveillance Masculinity, and the Politics of Tactical Dress |
|---|---|
| Type | Journal article |
| Authors | Groves, Andrew |
| Abstract | This article introduces surveillance masculinity as a new theoretical framework for understanding male dress practices shaped by control, visibility, and spatial risk. Using the work of Italian designer Massimo Osti as a case study, it argues that his work enacts a form of fabricated resistance: a materially grounded strategy of tactical concealment, modularity, and adaptive opacity. Designed amid the political instability of 1970s–80s Bologna, Osti’s clothing systems, including garment dyeing, camouflage, and technical fabric innovation, challenged dominant fashion paradigms by rejecting authorship, disrupting legibility, and resisting spectacle. The article situates these innovations within expanding surveillance infrastructures, reading Osti’s garments as defensive dress: mechanisms of resilience that frame visibility not as expression, but as risk. In doing so, it positions menswear as a political interface that negotiates space within regimes of surveillance and control. Surveillance masculinity departs from dominant models of male fashionability, foregrounding unreadability, strategic concealment, and material systems designed to manage exposure and assert autonomy. Reorienting fashion studies, the article theorises a mode of dress that withholds, adapts, and survives, not to be seen, but to remain beyond capture. |
| Keywords | surveillance masculinity |
| fabricated resistance | |
| tactical dress | |
| menswear | |
| Massimo Osti | |
| Journal | Fashion Theory |
| ISSN | 1362-704X |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publisher | University of Westminster |