At the beginning of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the world dressed in a navy blue, normative, Western suit. He had already shed the satyr laugh with which he presented the show Servant of the people. His popularity was so great that he managed to transform a bizarre fiction into the presidency of the country. But the reality check was fiercer than he ever imagined. As Putin’s threat intensified, Zelenski relegated white shirts and neat ties. Order was breaking into a thousand pieces, and the aesthetic vision of the president of the small eastern European republic was turned upside down. From then on, as if it were a secular promise, he would put on a humble khaki T-shirt, perpetuating that image of a small man, of David facing the Russian Goliath. Zelenski, primus inter pares, showed his compatriots that he sweated, that he smelled of wounded humanity.
Since Churchill, during World War II, we have not seen an elected president of a European country dressed in uniform. I remember the rulers in the Balkans butcher shop dressed as diplomats from the East and duly dotted with dandruff. El Viejo León, on the other hand, appealed to a formula that would end up becoming mythical, “blood, effort, tears and sweat”, although he did not get rid of his bow tie and cigar or walk through the rubble. And he only needed to raise the collar of his Royal Navy double-breasted coat to announce that “we will fight on the beaches”.
“No safety pins, no buttons, you won’t need a needle or thread,” read the slogan of a Cooper Underwear Company campaign aimed at single men back in 1904. The new textile industry made it easier to manufacture this undergarment for peasants, workers, and soldiers. Until Marlon Brando arrived in that shrunken, sweaty white T-shirt in A Streetcar Named Desire. It was a cinematic coup that exposed his vulnerability as a man, his domesticity in jeopardy.
“The shirt is the message,” Silvia Alexandrowitch, fashion historian and author of Before You Forget (Editorial Superflua), tells me, who stresses that Zelenski’s way of wearing a shirt is identical to that of so many men who they see daily on television and so many others who fight to defend their country. Establishes a symbolic line. “It indicates that he has the courage to show himself to the world and also to the enemy as a vulnerable and empathetic man with his family,” she says.
Just search Google for Zelenski t-shirt to see that dozens of models with his face and slogans such as “Captain Ukraine”, “Hero” or “I’m not hiding”, “I’m not afraid of anyone” are already being sold online. The shirt acts as a banner, the true icon of the resistance of the Ukrainian people. He dressed her – under an equally khaki sweatshirt – even in his meeting with Joe Biden at the White House, in which he even told him “I need ammunition, not travel”.
It must not be forgotten that Zelensky is a civilian, nor that the Ukrainian armed forces have a chief, Serhi Shaptala. But there is no true leadership without emotional connection, and he is aware that his is the image of Ukraine to the world. The one of a simple shirt, worn, very human.
