Radical chic

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Radical chic is the fashionable practice of upper-class people associating with politically radical people and causes. The journalist Tom Wolfe coined the term in his article "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's", which New York magazine published in June 1970. The term has since become widely used in American English, French and Italian. Unlike dedicated activists, revolutionaries or dissenters, those who engage in "radical chic" remain frivolous political agitators—ideologically invested in their cause of choice only so far as it advances their liberal elite social standing. 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." "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).