When Reaction Becomes Avant-Garde

Clavicular, Looksmaxxing, and the Fashioning of Hierarchy

This essay was first published in French by Le Grand Continent and has been revised for Vivatopia.

On June 23, 2026, a twenty-year-old influencer known as Clavicular opened a Paris fashion show in the courtyard of the Musée des Archives Nationales. His fame did not begin in fashion, but in the online world of looksmaxxing, where the male body is treated as a destiny. His name is Braden Peters, and around a million people know him by a pseudonym borrowed from the bone his community fetishizes: the clavicle, whose width is believed to measure masculinity.

What does it mean that a figure born out of incel forums is opening a fashion show in Paris? It is tempting to see this as another calculated provocation in an industry that has seen everything before. The significance, however, lies less in Clavicular’s personal beliefs than in the passage from subculture to prestige. The Clavicular moment reveals how illiberalism becomes normalized through everyday practices, and fashion is one of the spaces where this hierarchy acquires prestige and becomes desirable.

The Body as a Ranking System

The cosmology of looksmaxxing is brutally clear: appearance determines desirability, and desirability determines status. Those who are beautiful reign supreme; those who are ugly are doomed. The only way out is called “ascension,” meaning becoming more beautiful and therefore more powerful. There is a presentable version, softmaxxing, involving dieting, weight training, and strategic haircuts, and a radical version, hardmaxxing, involving surgery, hormones, and accepted biomedical risks.

Clavicular belongs to this second school: he says he has been injecting himself with testosterone since he was fourteen and now believes he is infertile because his body no longer produces testosterone naturally. He also recommends that viewers hit their jaws with a hammer to make them denser, a practice his community calls bonesmashing.

The commodification of the body is not new. Women have long been subjected to standards that make beauty a criterion of value: they are expected to discipline their bodies and present themselves as desirable. Looksmaxxing extends and radicalizes this neoliberal logic among men. At a moment when traditional markers of masculine status such as salary, profession, and the ability to provide for a family have become less reliable, bodily appearance offers a seemingly immediate and measurable substitute.

At a moment when traditional markers of masculine status have become less reliable, bodily appearance offers a seemingly immediate and measurable substitute.

One character trait helps explain Clavicular’s success: his sincerity. Silicon Valley biohackers often cloak their protocols in the language of health and longevity. Clavicular states his aims without pretense: domination and desirability. His bluntness becomes a form of authenticity when he films his injections and recounts his surgeries and recoveries. In April, he collapsed during a livestream in a Miami shopping mall after a suspected overdose and was taken to the hospital. Although the incident was not part of his cultivated persona, livestream celebrity made the breakdown itself part of the spectacle.

The Politics of Denying Politics

Criminologists Anda Solea and Lisa Sugiura have shown how content originating in the incel sphere is rebranded on TikTok to evade moderation. The stigmatized term “incel” gives way to apparently neutral categories such as “Sub5.” The “blackpill” ideology, i.e. the belief that physical appearance biologically dooms certain men to sexual failure and justifies resentment toward women, is repackaged as self-improvement advice. They call this process “normiefication,” a gateway to more extreme content.

Clavicular is less a theorist than an ideal vehicle for this world because he treats it as a matter of visibility rather than doctrine. When asked about his political beliefs, he presents his choices as responses to financial and media opportunities. And indeed, his livestreams on the platform Kick earn him, he declares, about $100,000 a month.

Politics, in the lexicon of his community, belongs to jesters and buffoons. Yet he was filmed in January at a Miami nightclub singing Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler” alongside Andrew Tate and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. He also told the New York Times that his interest in looksmaxxing began with a desire to influence others politically by becoming more attractive.

His insistence that none of this is political should be taken seriously, because the denial is part of the politics. When a teenager builds an audience around hierarchy, sexual scarcity, and racialized beauty standards, he is engaging in politics. The “PSL” scale, or “Physical Sexual Market Value,” claims to rate attractiveness objectively while favoring traits associated with a European ideal. Its eugenicist and misogynistic underpinnings become more effective because they appear as personal development.

His insistence that none of this is political should be taken seriously, because the denial is part of the politics.

Remilia, or the Reaction That Became Avant-Garde

Clavicular’s appearance on the runway is not an isolated eccentricity. His first fashion show, held in February in New York for designer Elena Velez, included the debut of Remilia Atelier, a collaboration between Velez and Remilia Corporation, one of the most advanced laboratories of contemporary reactionary aestheticization.

Remilia is a digital art collective founded in 2021 by a man operating under the female pseudonym Charlotte Fang. Its flagship Milady Maker collection of 10,000 neochibi-style anime avatars became the foundation of a broader ecosystem encompassing online communities, merchandise, cultural events, cryptocurrency projects, and fashion collaborations. Milady has reached a valuation of more than $150 million. Remilia describes itself as a “global art-industrial conglomerate” and a “corporation-as-artwork”: commerce, provocation, and community are folded into the same aesthetic project.

One of Remilia’s clearest intellectual reference points is Nick Land’s accelerationism and the broader neo-reactionary milieu shaped by his work. Land, the British author of The Dark Enlightenment, has influenced some Silicon Valley circles for the past decade. In 2022, revelations that Charlotte Fang had previously operated as Miya, a persona associated with racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic posts and extreme online communities, might have destroyed the collective. Instead, Milady’s value recovered beyond its pre-scandal level, and a “post-canceled” identity became part of the community’s founding myth. A spin-off collection marketed through a “schizophrenic reactionary aesthetic” later surpassed the original in sales.

Political consolidation followed. On the eve of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Remilia was the main sponsor of the Coronation Ball, whose keynote speaker was Steve Bannon. A representative of the collective took the stage after Bannon to describe Remilia’s project: remaking the world one meme at a time. Favorable cryptocurrency regulation explains only part of the alliance. The alignment is also aesthetic: a political movement defined by viral images encounters a collective that has made memetic circulation into an art form.

The alignment is also aesthetic: a political movement defined by viral images encounters a collective that has made memetic circulation into an art form.

Remilia has explicitly recruited outsiders: fashion students, online Catholics, cosplayers, and figures from New York’s Dimes Square, the Lower East Side scene that blends post-irony and rejection of cultural progressivism. It is Landian accelerationism translated into a participatory lifestyle brand.

When Hierarchy Becomes Common Sense

Fashion is not incidental to this story. Elena Velez, a semifinalist for the LVMH Prize in 2024 and long celebrated for metallic corsets and structural designs, has gradually traded structure for “rage-bait,” a strategy that converts outrage into visibility. Her February show, organized around the aesthetics and practices of looksmaxxing, placed figures from the online far right in the front row and sent an influencer associated with extreme thinness down the runway alongside Clavicular.

During the same Paris fashion season, Marilyn Manson, the 1990s shock-rock icon facing multiple allegations of abuse, opened the runway show for ERD, Enfants Riches Déprimés, a Franco-American luxury brand that turns punk imagery and nihilism into markers of distinction.

These choices cannot be reduced to commercial provocation. Culture has become a central arena for the circulation and normalization of illiberal values beyond parties and political discourse. Body culture is especially effective because it makes hierarchy desirable through beauty standards, while embedding it within the broader commercial ecosystem of wellness and self-improvement. The illiberalism of looksmaxxing thus emerges through a radicalization of neoliberal self-optimization.

Culture has become a central arena for the circulation and normalization of illiberal values beyond parties and political discourse. The illiberalism of looksmaxxing thus emerges through a radicalization of neoliberal self-optimization.

Looksmaxxing is exemplary of a lived ideology because it requires no doctrinal adherence but begins as a set of bodily transformations. Beliefs do not precede practices; they are formed through them. Looksmaxxing teaches people to see the world as a hierarchy before giving them the language to justify it. The doctrine may arrive later, or never arrive at all, but the ideology is already embedded in the gestures.

We can therefore speak of “banal illiberalism,” borrowing Michael Billig’s concept of “banal nationalism.” Illiberalism does not advance only through parties or leaders: by the time the doctrine arrives, the world it describes may already feel natural.