Marxism as a style

   I was recently working on an entry in this blog about outdoor clothing, and the writing and thinking on the subject led me to think about clothing made from coarse materials. As I thought on clothing made from these less-refined textiles (and who might have worn them years ago), images came to my mind of the early twentieth century worker proletariat. As it turned out, I chose not to include these ideas in that particular entry because the post seemed too rambling, but the idea has stayed in my head, so I'm writing about it here.
   I don't know why exactly I thought of these image-ideas, but I do know that this history has at times been very important to me, as I have in the past considered myself a radical Marxist, at least in theory. I still believe in many Marxist economic ideas, in particular, the exposition of capitalist ideologies as written about by people like Antonio Gramsci. I also suspect that old posters celebrating the worker proletariat, and the films of Sergei Eisenstein, had very much to do with it.
   So it is that as a person that very much likes particular styles of clothing (I wouldn't however consider myself fashion-conscious or fashionable), I have always associated clothing with particular times and social movements, and my current obsession with water repellent clothing has led me to discover the wonders of clothing that places these properties over comfort, and the connotations with workers and their struggles from one hundred or so years ago that it holds for me.
   So as I sit here writing in a pair of 65/35 polyester-cotton blend pants designed to be water resistant, I am thinking about how Marxist-proletariat idea(l)s have become for me more an interest in retro fashion and design than in active political movement.
   I think about the visual design style of Constructivism in what was then the Soviet Union, the buttoned-up-to-the-top suit jacket made popular by Mao (but originally called the Zhongshan Suit), and the early twentieth century newsboy hats often seen in posters from that era propagating popular struggle and worker strikes. I myself wore a kind of newsboy hat almost twenty years ago (also favoring buttoning the top button on my wool jackets at that time), and although I don't wear clothing in that way anymore, I still have a kind of leftist belief that there's probably nothing worse in personal style than trying to show that you've got money in the way that you dress.
   So as I finish up this short entry on the idea of certain clothing fabrics connoting a classic radical leftism, I realize that although it's true that I have very little interest in active political struggle, I still retain a place in my heart for a style associated with one of its' applications. Marxist? I doubt it. Materialist? Perhaps.