The Fashion System as Soft Power in a Geopolitical Framework. A Critical Investigation of the Kenya and Liberia Athlete’s Delegation Garments Dressed at Olympic Games Tokyo 2021

The development of cultural products in a globalized and neoliberal context has led to cultural and identity changes in the structure of society. The Fashion System has been understood as a function of cultural industries to the extent that it helps the construction of a particular image of a country through the utilization and incorporation of local, cultural, traditional values, sensibilities and skills. That guided a tendency to incorporate notions of creativity and culture into economic and political development strategies (Casadei and Lee 2020). This is understood from the soft power conceptualization because it wants to project a dominant image capable of representing different territories with a specific purpose of national cohesion and belonging (Popović 2017). This investigation aims to reflect how fashion is used as a cultural tool that enables nations to be recognized and stereotyped through a certain image related to a particular representation, related to the concept of popular geopolitics as a tool of soft power, because they want to project their culture and idea of future. The investigation focuses on the Kenya and Liberia Olympic athlete’s clothes from the inauguration ceremony in Tokyo, 2021, where the garment used resemble the traditional clothing used by their cultures.