This week, the fashion giant Vogue published a cover featuring Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska looking grim against a backdrop of once visible sandbags and marble pillars. More photos follow in the magazine itself. One that stands out in particular is where, controversially, Zelenska poses in a navy blue coat over a long dress against the ravages of war in the country.
But July 26 is not the first time Vogue aestheticized a crisis. In 2010, the magazine featured model Kristen McMenamy submerged and surrounded by glistening, black oil—a response to the devastating Gulf oil spill at the time. But perhaps the most enduring photo is from June 1941. Titled “Fashion Is Unbreakable,” the black-and-white photo shows a woman impeccably dressed in a suit, standing in the rubble of a bombed-out building.
This week, Zelenska’s cover received a divided public response: some felt it was a way to capture the emotional toll of the devastating war in Ukraine, while others felt it was romanticizing the armed conflict, thus minimizing its damage. But fashion and war go back a long way, making the debate less straightforward than it seems. “It has been said that however easy it may seem for an art at the time, fashion combined with journalism has the power to reflect not only the times, but also to affect changes (negative or positive), especially in the process of shaping the impressive . the minds of a future generation,” noted NSSMag.
Fashion magazines — at one point almost interchangeable with ‘women’s’ and ‘ladies’ magazines‘ – have had a historical role to play in mediating the conflict to a public struggling to come to terms with its meaning. During World War II, for example, Vogue played an instrumental role: the magazine’s editors worked with the British Ministry of Information to serve as a conduit to talk to the country’s women and implicitly instruct them about their role in the war.
“Women’s magazines had a special place in government thinking during the war because, with men in the forces, women bore all the responsibility of family life; and the way to get women’s attention was through the pages of magazines which, in total, were read by almost every woman in the country,” noted Audrey Withers, of Britain. Vogue’s Wartime editor during World War II. “… every subject in which the intelligent sophisticated woman is at present interested,” Withers wrote in a letter to American editor-in-chief Edna Chase at the time, about the future of Vogue.
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At the height of World War II, Withers commissioned Lee Miller, an American model and photographer, to document the war from the front lines. Miller’s iconography included a photograph of her in Hitler’s bathtub after he left his residence—images that showed defiance, resistance, and most importantly, provided not only information, but an intellectual form of engagement with politics for the magazine’s female readers. .
The implicit messages behind Zelenska’s cover in 2022 are no different: “Women’s voices in this fight must be heard, must be represented… [Zelenska is] the first to speak of the human experience of war. Vogue The former editor of Ukraine Tetyana Solovey noted. The cover story itself explores the inside of the first lady who came to protect the emotional nerve center of the war—a world apart from the bruxism of geopolitical diplomacy.
But there’s more to the matter: the piece also repeatedly emphasized her role as a wife and mother—putting her at the delicate intersection between vulnerability and resilience, and reinforcing gender roles while losing control in other areas in the country. Its placement in the heart of the gray and desolation of war, then, makes for a striking image. Some might argue that’s the point: besides Vogueother women’s magazines played a crucial role in normalizing gender expectations during the war—informing readers about the war while also emphasizing femininity.
Some commentators then rightly note that fashion and politics are not mutually exclusive – as fashion magazines have at various times applied soft power in shaping political conversations among their demographics. When women express an interest in fashion, “it’s often used as a means of denial [them] access to political conversations,” noted Lauren Duca in Teen Vogue. In 2016, for example, many fashion magazines became explicitly political in the run-up to the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States.
However, a photo shoot amidst the wreckage of an ongoing crisis feels tonally insensitive at best and callously offensive at worst. The photo shoot doesn’t capture the front lines the way the Withers edition photo does. While fashion magazines and war have shaped a complicated story, there is still a fine line that separates photojournalism from photo shoots – with Zelenskyy’s cover falling into the latter category, there is real harm in glossing over the brutality of the conflict in an attempt to tell a story. for a person and not for the war itself.
