Around 2010, Pavel Klymenko started noticing a curious brand of clothing gaining popularity with Kiev’s upper-middle class. The hoodies and shirts weren’t especially fashionable. They were covered in garish Nordic imagery, like a wolf howling at the moon, and fit into the macho style favored by many Ukrainian men. But Klymenko, an activist who monitors the extreme right in European football, recognized the name often emblazoned on the clothes in Gothic letters: “Thor Steinar,” two words that, for the past decade, have been synonymous with Germany’s fascist fringe. “Previously it had been worn by Ukrainian neo-Nazis who want to show off,” he says. “Now it was becoming popular among wealthy people.”

Klymenko learned that Thor Steinar had just opened a Kiev store in Dream Town, an upscale mall co-owned by a flashy Jewish businessman. The mall features a large-scale model of King Kong and hosts popular global brands like Zara and United Colors of Benetton; to many shoppers, Thor Steinar seemed no different. “It was attracting random customers who didn’t have a clue about the history of the brand,” Klymenko says. Before long, he started noticing cheap Thor Steinar knockoffs in the city’s chaotic street markets: “You could see really bad fakes on people who couldn’t afford the originals.”

At a glance, Thor Steinar is easily confused with mainstream, pseudo-collegiate clothing brands like Aeropostale and Abercrombie & Fitch. But the company has often used in its designs what appear to be subtle Nazi references, such as Messerschmitt aircraft or Germanic runes. The label has helped transform the style and culture of the European far right and, in recent years, attempted something even more disconcerting—a shift into the mainstream of Eastern European fashion. Over the past decade and a half, Thor Steinar has gone from a small business patronized by German neo-Nazis into a multimillion-dollar clothing chain with a presence throughout Europe.

In the early years after German reunification, members of the extreme right were generally easy to identify—with shaved heads, bomber jackets, and military boots. They favored brands like Lonsdale, Fred Perry, and New Balance, whose logos—the “N” on New Balance sneakers, for example—could be repurposed as references to Nazism. By the early 2000s, these brands had distanced themselves from their far-right customers, and public blowback had made it harder for skinheads to function in everyday life. This created a dilemma for neo-Nazis: If the skinhead look was out, how were they supposed to identify each other?

In 1999, Axel Kopelke, a secretive man with no known connection to the extreme right, founded Thor Steinar in Königs Wusterhausen, a small town near Berlin. Like other parts of former East Germany, Königs Wusterhausen is sleepy and gray, with train tracks cutting through its center and a short main street lined with boxy buildings. The area has long been one of Germany’s hotbeds of neo-Nazi activity. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many of its factories closed down, leaving a generation of men with few professional prospects. Many turned to right-wing politics, blaming their misfortunes on outsiders.