The Rise of Anti-Surveillance Clothing

I am not a schizophrenic. This is not a paranoid fantasy. It is the truth of living in America, and much of the world, in 2026.

I was indeed being watched. There are dozens of cameras lining the streets of my tiny town—on store fronts, outside of houses, on public land. Everywhere.

There were 70 million surveillance cameras installed in the United States by 2019, one for every five Americans. That number has undoubtedly risen since then. Flock Safety, a private corporation, has partnered with thousands of police departments since the company was founded in 2017, and there are now an estimated 170,000 or more Flock cameras across the country, most of which are connected to a local police department and each of which can read license plates and track vehicles. And none of these stats include the 74.9 million cameras on people’s private homes, ones made largely by Amazon’s Ring, and many of which can directly be accessed by the police. Then, of course, is the fact that everyone has a surveillance device right in their pocket, and can record anyone at any time, not to mention a generation of new camera-equipped glasses from Meta and Snapchat.

Few people seem to support the vast and rapid proliferation of surveillance technology: The installation of Flock cameras has drawn protests across the country. TikToks of people explaining how to sabotage or take them down go viral regularly. And 62 percent of Americans say they’re concerned about the cameras. Interestingly, the anti-surveillance sentiment is one of the few issues that crosses party lines—nearly an even percentage of Democrats and Republicans say they’re against the use of these cameras.

But our worries about constantly being on camera have not, at least so far, changed anything. The cameras continue to be installed. Police departments continue to partner with Flock and other surveillance companies. Data centers run by companies like Axon (which also makes police body cameras) store your biometric data—facial structure, any unique physical features you may have—possibly in perpetuity. Our surveillance state is seemingly here to stay.

And so, some people have begun to fantasize about a different solution: What if we could just disappear? If we are constantly being seen, what would happen if we became unseeable—at least to cameras?

Over the past fifteen years or so, artists, fashion designers, and activists have attempted to design clothing, makeup and other bodily accessories meant to make it harder or impossible for cameras to see people’s faces, log their unique attributes, and/or track them with facial recognition technology.

So-called “adversarial fashion” might be something as simple as painting a pattern on your face, or it could be more complicated—certain anti-surveillance garments attempt to inject false data into cameras and the algorithms that back them so that they can’t track any one human feature, or even the human body itself; others use patches embedded within clothes that heat up to confused infrared camera systems.

Adam Harvey, a technologist who works on privacy rights, was the first to popularize the idea of adversarial clothing through his 2010 NYU master’s thesis CV Dazzle, in which he developed a series of replicable patterns that anyone could make using different hairstyles, fashion accessories and/or makeup. The idea was to reverse or complicate what surveillance cameras interpreted as the dark and light areas of people’s faces—the nose bridge, which reads as light on security cameras, would become dark. The under-eye area, which normally reads as dark, would become light.

The project largely worked. CV Dazzle successfully confused the most popular facial recognition algorithm at the time, called the Viola-Jones Detection Algorithm. Harvey has gone on to create several anti-surveillance-detection tools, and his work is often cited by the people who promote and study adversarial fashion. A major fashion label even consulted Harvey on creating anti-surveillance clothing.

There’s a problem though: Harvey thinks none of this stuff really works.

“Without making yourself invisible with a Harry Potter cloak, the reality is a bit different—more nuanced, more technical, and sometimes not as fun to communicate,” he told me.

The issue with adversarial fashion is less the adversarial, and more the fashion: in the AI era, detection algorithms are constantly changing, and every adversarial pattern can only be tested against so many models—and only ones that are publicly available to whoever is researching or making the clothes.

Harvey said he knows for a fact that several brands and individuals making anti-surveillance garments are basing their designs on computer vision models that are just demos (what Harvey calls “toy algorithms”), not what’s actually in-use in the real-world. Most consumers of these clothes aren’t aware of that when they buy these garments, Harvey said. And there’s no reason a surveillance company would give out the actual models they’re using to detect people’s features; and those algorithms are constantly being updated.

"There are many ways to beat, subvert, or block face detection, face recognition, person recognition…but they don't look good to cover yourself up,” Harvey said. “It’s an affront to someone’s beauty to cover themselves up so much, to wear so much occlusion, that you don’t actually look like you exist.”

As of now, people are being perhaps inaccurately convinced of adversarial fashion’s abilities. If these companies wanted to take anti-detection seriously, Harvey said, there’d be a lot more time and research poured into the testing of these garments in the real-world, not just with demos, before they’re sold to consumers.

“There’s a lot of snake oil in this field right now,” Harvey told me. “And I think it’s actually going to negatively affect people’s perception of this kind of fashion that actually does have potential.”

Beyond buying things that don’t work, there might be a larger problem with adversarial fashion: like so much in the capitalist world, it might convince people to look for individualist, consumerist solutions to what is actually a systemic, political problem.

“It's the idea that we can purchase a kind of resistance to surveillance,” Simone Browne, a professor of surveillance studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, told me. “For the most part, that’s not really doing anything about collective refusal, or changing the various institutions, the laws that govern how we move about space, move about the public, and think about privacy.”

Browne also pointed out that the clothes inadequately address the racial and gender variance in how people are surveilled.

Black people in particular are hyper-policed in the US—they’re disproportionately surveilled, with higher numbers of cameras deployed in majority-black neighborhoods. And black people’s fashion is highly policed too—the idea that someone could wear a brightly-colored, glitchy garment to evade detection reveals a whole host of assumptions about who is policed and how.
The algorithms of cameras themselves also have frequently been proved to be built with racial bias: one 2018 study, for example, found that black women were misidentified nearly 35 percent of the time via surveillance cameras, whereas white men were nearly always correctly identified.

Browne isn’t totally against the idea of adversarial fashion, but she said it might fall more in line with fashion art projects that call attention to various social issues rather than a practical solution for a growing societal problem. She pointed to the artist micha cárdenas’s Unstoppable, which attempted to answer the question “what would technology for black lives be?” with proposed DIY bulletproof clothing, as an example of fashion successfully being used for critique
and awareness.

One of the companies actively selling anti-surveillance garments is CAP_ABLE, an Italian brand with a series of complexly-patterned shirts, sweaters, dresses and pants, which range from about $150 to nearly $800. These clothes are not meant to hide you from the real-world—they’re less bank robber chic and more hippy tie die galore meets Collina Strada. But the point is not to disappear you from the eyes of your fellow humans, but to make you unreadable by high-tech cameras: The clothes are reversible, with one side meant to appear normal on AI-enabled surveillance cameras, and the other meant to confuse the technology and hinder its ability to recognize that it is seeing a person at all.

The designer Rachele Didero founded the company while living in New York in 2019. At the time, public awareness of just how much we were being surveilled and the coming future of hyper-accurate AI detection, was growing. But when Didero began talking about her idea for anti-surveillance clothing, many people she knew pushed back. They said she’d be designing clothes for terrorists or bank robbers. Didero said most of those people had now changed their tune.

To Didero, CAP_ABLE is both a practical anti-surveillance project and a tool of raising awareness.

“It’s very important to use a tangible project to talk about something that feels very intangible to people,” she said. “Of course, we’re not creating an invisibility cloak, because that’s impossible now, and we’re aware of the difficulty of being ahead of the technologies of recognition, but it’s still very important that we do this research and give people the possibility of lowering the percent chance of being recognized. And we at least give people back the power of understanding how they want to be read by technology.”

As I researched this story, my awareness of how much I was being surveilled did indeed grow. I live in a rather rural area, but I checked a map of Flock cameras (one that Flock is currently trying to get taken down) and realized there were two down the street from me.

My dog walks have become more creepy-feeling once I realized just how monitored I was. But I also had to begin to confront my own complicity in this system. Even if I made myself invisible to the cameras around me, I’d still be part of the problem: there’s a surveillance device constantly in my pocket in the form of a phone, and I have a Ring Camera doorbell, which I ostensibly just use to see when I have packages, but nonetheless is a surveillance device capable of monitoring those around me.

That seems to be the biggest problem here: whether adversarial clothing works or not, we first should probably figure out as a society what we even want. We seem to be trapped in a conundrum of constantly buying into more surveillance and also being against it.

It’s a strange thought: that we are regularly surveilling each other and ourselves, recording every interaction at our doors, putting strangers on the internet for clicks, and then protesting and attempting to evade that surveillance however we can.

Maybe that’s the fantasy of anti-surveillance clothing—not that it will actually disappear us, but that it will allow us to buy our way out of a problem most of us are actively furthering. And that’s what the U.S. always does best, right? Creates a problem and then monetizes the solution. Poison the food system? Just buy organic. Addicted to social media? Just buy a Brick. Constantly monitoring yourself and being monitored by others? Just buy some new clothes.

Perhaps before (or in addition to) putting on a brightly patterned garment, we should ask ourselves why that might be necessary in the first place.

P.E. Moskowitz is a writer based in New York. Their latest book, Breaking Awake A Reporter's Search for a New Life, and a New World, Through Drugs, is available now.