The Latest Fashion Trend? Dressing like You're in a Cult

April 2, 2018 1:04 p.m. ET

The series lives up to its title, with fast-food poisonings, 90-plus Rolls Royces and more than a few semi-automatic weapons. Through it all, the group retains its allegiance to its vivid clothing palette. “The colors were always supposed to be sunrise colors which was supposed to reflect a new start, a new day,” said Mr. Way. In the cult’s infancy in India, its followers wore flowing robes, but after relocating in 1981 to their new headquarters in a small town in Oregon (soon to be christened Rajneeshpuram), they switched to Pacific Northwest-appropriate fare: flannels, down vests and boots. At one point, they even negotiated an exclusive contract with Levis for the orange jeans that were sold at Rajneeshpuram’s local department store.

A sea of Sannyasins in their all-red clothes from Netflix’s documentary series “Wild Wild Country”.

Watchers of the series have been hypnotized by the cult’s consistent, infrared outfits. The Rajneesh may have plotted horrible acts, from voter fraud to assassinations, but some viewers are talking about the clothes. As one fan commented on Twitter, “There should be a documentary on where the Rajneesh got all their red and purple clothes.” Though it’s been decades since the events of the series, the fashion zeitgeist is coincidentally reflecting the cult’s nearly monochromatic head-to-toe aesthetic. Months before anyone had even heard of “Wild Wild Country,” the fall 2018 men’s fashion shows delivered similarly cult-ish looks: British designer Craig Green’s foreboding all-black pieces, Jil Sanders’s angelic total white outfits and several all-grey skirt-sets from Japan’s Undercover.

The Rajneesh’s clothes weren’t driven by fashion; they’re an idiosyncratic signifier of the cult’s power. Watching the documentary, it is eerie to see the red-clad members standing in such sharp contrast to the townspeople in their blue overalls. “Generally, the issue of uniforms or identical dress within a destructive cult, e.g., the Rajneesh penchant for orange, is about losing individual identity,” wrote Rick Ross, a cult specialist and the executive director of the nonprofit Cult Education Institute, over email. “The group wants all its members to merge their identity with the group and lose their sense of independence and individual expression.”

Some very cult-like clothes as seen during the fall 2018 men’s fashion shows in Europe. From left, British designer Craig Green’s all-black, Jil Sander’s pearly white and Undercover’s near-total grey out.
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The Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult in Japan wore all-white; the Geneva-based Order of the Solar Temple draped themselves in crusader-style robes; and the Heaven’s Gate cult in San Diego famously wore identical

Nike

Decade sneakers. (Nike discounted the model after that cult’s mass suicide. Today, a vintage pair is available for $1,499 on eBay.)

Though picking out a new sweater is light years away from succumbing to the destructive, brainwashing mentality of cult life, the phrase, “to merge their identity with the group,” could also aptly describe a fashion-obsessed customer’s motivation for buying into a trend. And right now, the Fashion world is in a particularly cult-y moment.

Fashion critics, in all seriousness, use the terms “cult of Gucci” and “cult of Balenciaga” to describe the pull of these cherished brands. More than simply buying clothes, today, people are buying into a tribe. Brands are certainly aware of this: Logos which help consumers pledge allegiance to brands are becoming more conspicuous and design signatures like Gucci’s embroidered cat faces shout, ‘I’m one of them!’ from seven blocks away.

Devotees of the cult brand Supreme line up for hours each Thursday outside their stores, such as this one in London, to purchase a new hoodie or beanie bearing the label’s logo.
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This group-think phenomenon was on full display in January at an event at the Gucci Museum in Florence. The brand’s designer

Alessandro Michele

(clad, earnestly, in a crown) was mobbed by fans dressed in his snake-stitched and shearling lined designs. The Cult of Gucci had arrived to meet their king. Similarly, when Paris-based designer Rick Owens signed books at his store in Soho last May, zealots in his signature drop-crotch trousers, skyscraper sneakers and elongated black muscle-T-shirts wrapped around the block. Their uniform of space-goth clothes was as obedient as the Rajneesh’s red. And then there’s Supreme, a fashion cult that holds a weekly conclave of a sort: When new products are released each Thursday, enthusiasts dressed in past season’s Supreme piece line up outside stores from Tokyo to London to New York City, just for the opportunity to add a new hoodie or beanie bearing the 24-year-old brand’s red box logo to their collection.

“You can’t build that loyalty in a day,” explained

Scott Sternberg,

a California-based designer who operated Band of Outsiders from 2005 to 2016. In that time, his brand’s primary-colored preppiness earned him fervent, one might even say cult-like, fans. Last week, Mr. Sternberg announced a new fashion venture, Entireworld, an approachably priced, direct-to-consumer brand that echoes Band of Outsiders’ tidy American look, with a two-minute-thirty-eight-second video of himself speaking directly into the camera. Mr. Sternberg starts out talking about clothing, but as the clip goes on, he gets into a larger philosophy of how we live. “I started thinking about this idea of utopia, building a perfect world from scratch, a blank slate with a sense of logic and integrity, optimism and purity,” said Mr. Sternberg, employing language that could have come straight from one of the Bhagwan’s books. Today it seems, to sell the clothes, you also need to sell the cult.

Write to Jacob Gallagher at [email protected]