By Javier Surasky
This is the original post version
A Spanish (ES) version is available here
Anti-surveillance fashion
Visibility
is no longer experienced only as a social experience. It is increasinglyadministered as a technical regime. Cameras, sensors, and artificial
intelligence systems monitor bodies continuously through automated processes
that run in the background and, in many cases, remain unnoticed.
Within this
landscape, anti-surveillance fashion has emerged as a still marginal practice.
It relies on clothing, makeup, and accessories designed to disrupt algorithmic
surveillance and facial recognition, especially systems grounded in computer
vision and machine learning.
From this standpoint, anti-surveillance fashion should be read less as an aesthetic trend than as a reaction to the expansion of AI as an infrastructure of control. For that reason, it is not best understood as a technical fix to surveillance, but rather as a political and social indicator. Its appearance points to a deeper structural shift: surveillance logics are moving away from institutionalarchitectures and reattaching themselves to the individual body as a new anchor point.
Algorithmic surveillance
In
Foucaultian terms, one way to situate this turn is to start from practices
rather than from the “universals” (State, society, sovereignty) that usually
organize our explanations: if we assume “that universals do not exist”
(Foucault, 2007:18), algorithmic surveillance becomes intelligible as a set of
procedures that produce social reality.
Instead of
understanding people as subjects, systems tend to reduce them to patterns: “The
datafication of the body separates the physical from the digital, turning
embodied subjects into information that can be transmitted electronically”
(Rogers, 2025:24), which becomes a source of data from which identities,
intentions, or dangerousness are extracted. Algorithmic surveillance does not
need to know who you are, but which category you fall into, or, in other terms,
it does not recognize subjects but correlations.
Clothing,
which historically has operated as a cultural and identity marker, also becomes
a variable of defense: texture, color, form, and movement are integrated into
that flow of data that feeds AI models, in order to confront them on their own
terrain.
Lessons from the First World War
Adam
Harvey’s work on CV Dazzle is an unavoidable antecedent within the topic we
analyze: it is an application of First World War “dazzle” camouflage to
computer vision. Dazzle camouflage did not seek to make objects such as
warships invisible, but rather to confuse the enemy’s calculations about
course, speed, and orientation by applying high-contrast colors and geometric
paint patterns.
Harvey
applies that logic of perceptual disruption to the human face through
high-contrast, asymmetrical makeup and hairstyles to break the configuration
that algorithms expect to detect in a face, since, if there is no detectable
face, the rest of the biometric analysis is not activated. These aesthetic
interventions make it possible to deceive systems through an “open-source
anti-facial recognition toolkit where hair and make-up can be styled to
camouflage facial features from facial detection software programs” (Calvi,
2023:83).
Makeup is
no longer oriented toward “looking good,” but toward generating a “form of
unrecognisability” (Calvi, 2023:83), an invisibility in full exposure, which
connects with a broader genealogy of anti-surveillance objects and practices,
where the aesthetic functions as an interface of resistance.
The body as a surface for data capture
With the
term “biopolitics,” Foucault names a specific form of governmental
problematization of life: “I understood it as the way in which, since the
eighteenth century, attempts have been made to rationalize the problems posed
to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings
constituted as a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, longevity, races”
(Foucault, 2007:359).
However, as
Lemke warns (2017, 14–15), the concept of biopolitics has a range of possible
interpretations and, consequently, cannot be applied automatically; it requires
an operation of conceptual precision.
Given that
AI redefines the status of the body, now become a biological interface from
which vectors are generated, an opposition is produced between a situated and
vulnerable human body and an omnipresent and powerful system that observes it.
This mismatch gives rise to anti-surveillance fashion as a strategy for
repoliticizing the body and its role as an agent in the face of an environment
that appropriates it as a passive input.
Dressing
against surveillance is an attempt to break the fluidity of a system by
introducing visual noise where order is presumed: anti-surveillance camouflage
allows people to hide in plain sight, but it has an insurmountable limit
insofar as it proposes an individual exit (Monahan, 2015), which affects its
political weight. But to understand it fully, we must understand how
anti-surveillance fashion operates.
Four forms of resistance through clothing
Anti-surveillance
fashion is based on four broad groups of intervention that share the same
premise: the adversary is no longer a human observer, but a model trained on
massive data.
a)
Algorithmic interference: The use of visual patterns designed to confuse
computer vision models, since “even small pixel-level changes or subtle texture
manipulations can trigger severe detection failures” (Zhou et al., 2025:1).
b) Sensory
blocking: Materials that affect infrared sensors, thermal cameras, or depth
systems. In the case of thermal surveillance, for example, “it is required that
this piece of clothing will have a certain adversarial effect from any angle”
(Zhu et al., 2021:3), in such a way that it disrupts the system’s perception of
angles, distances, and/or movements.
c) Critical
urban camouflage: Kronman (2023:17) formulates it in playful terms: “playing
the game of avoidance and tricking AI with anti-surveillance designs is a type
of urban hide-and-seek.” Urban camouflage seeks a tactical reconfiguration of
presence: moving, blending in, and diverting algorithmic reading in an
environment where the background itself is already detection infrastructure.
d) Symbolic
disruption: These are designs that are not oriented toward evading
surveillance, but toward making it visible. Clothing functions as public
denunciation, not as a shield.
Technical limitations of anti-surveillance fashion
From a
strictly technical point of view, the response works poorly and inconsistently.
Systems evolve, adapt, retrain, and operate in multimodal ways, so surveillance
does not depend on a single signal.
But the
technical field of countersurveillance is advancing: at the beginning, external
and specific elements were used, from lasers to light-emission devices that had
to be aimed at cameras. Today, the introduction of visual noise in clothing is
privileged, making it unnecessary to carry any other equipment. So-called
adversarial attacks, for example, operate by segmenting people through
transformations and the occlusion of “areas of clothing in images” (Treu et
al., 2021:3). Each garment becomes a support for deforming the image and, at
the same time, its use can be justified as an ordinary aesthetic choice.
There are
even garments with controlled activation: “By leveraging temperature as a
control signal, the system simultaneously activates both RGB and infrared
patches, thereby achieving dual-modal evasion in a controllable manner” (Long
et al., 2025:8).
None of
this changes the reality that anti-surveillance techniques do not compete on
equal terms with state or corporate infrastructures and, worse still,
anti-surveillance tactics may even amplify factors of discrimination: “this
aestheticization of resistance and its accompanying discourses have serious
blind spots, specifically where issues of racial identity, difference, and
power are concerned. Given that biometric systems already ‘fail’ at a greater
rate for racial minorities, effectively nominating those populations for
increased scrutiny, what might be the effects of someone marked as Other openly
and intentionally challenging state surveillance systems?” (Monahan, 2015:165).
The garment
that protects also confirms the rule: the surveillance state will remain
omnipresent, and it creates a paradox, since the very practice that makes the
problem visible contributes to fragmenting the possibility of a collective
response.
For this
reason, we understand anti-surveillance fashion as a material pedagogy, insofar
as it makes tangible the abstractness of AI’s constant presence as a tool of
control: the garment becomes a reminder that AI is not neutral and that the
body matters politically. At the same time, we do not stop pointing out the
danger that it may become yet another aesthetic of the modern, since although
every individual practice of resistance has political effects, its
transformative potential depends on its collective articulation, which lies
beyond the aesthetic intervention on one’s own body.
Conclusion: dressing as an individual and a solidaristic political act
Anti-surveillance
fashion does not expect to put an end to algorithmic surveillance, but its
appearance and spread signal a breaking point in which the act of dressing
becomes subordinated to the existence of a control algorithm, exposing a flaw
in the structure of the social system, the result of the use and abuse of an
ungoverned AI.
Anti-surveillance
fashion is, more than a solution to a problem, a warning that debates about the
use of AI in surveillance cannot be limited to technical elements, but must
open up to basic questions that remain unanswered: What options exist for
people in a system that observes us permanently, and groups us without our
consent?
The body
becomes the last space of resistance. George Orwell already said it
(2021:190–191): “We cannot act collectively. We can only pass on our knowledge
from individual to individual, from generation to generation. In the face of
the Thought Police there is no other way.”
References
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