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radical chic

n. an affectation of radical left-wing views and the fasionable dress and lifestyle that goes with them

Wikipedia
Radical chic

Radical chic is a term coined by journalist Tom Wolfe in his 1970 essay "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's," to describe the adoption and promotion of radical political causes by celebrities, socialites, and high society. The concept has been described as "an exercise in double-tracking one's public image: on the one hand, defining oneself through committed allegiance to a radical cause, but on the other, vitally, demonstrating this allegiance because it is the fashionable, au courant way to be seen in moneyed, name-conscious Society." Unlike dedicated activists, revolutionaries, or dissenters, those who engage in radical chic remain frivolous political agitators. They are ideologically invested in their cause of choice only so far as it advances their social standing.

" Terrorist chic" is a modern expression with similar connotations. This derivative, however, de-emphasizes the class satire of Wolfe's original term, instead accentuating concerns over the semiotics of radicalism (such as the aestheticization of violence).

Usage examples of "radical chic".

In the bizarre four-limbed form they leaned together, murmured solemn verities, felt doomed and dramatic or glittered defiantly in radical chic.

There was a time when a Hampstead intellectual was automatically left-wing, and Hampstead was the heartland of radical chic.

It would be in the restaurant that she had almost picked that the hot TV alternative host would turn up, or the coven of fashionable younger novelists slope in to complain about their publishers, or a segment of the metropolitan radical chic meet to deconstruct the menu and most likely order Chablis!

The flat in the Fillmore was packed wall-to-wall with various folks, everyone from radical chic wannabe revolutionaries to some very tough looking Panthers in their black leather coats and dark dark glasses.

But I view that kind of cultural radical chic about as benignly as Tom Wolfe did its earlier political manifestations, and The Village Voice, as a standard-bearer of left-liberal values, quite astutely detected that I was in some sense the enemy.