The hero does not disappear, he transforms. The National Assembly will distribute new medals to heroic citizens on Tuesday, which provides an opportunity to examine in this series the mutations of heroism in contemporary society. Second case: President Zelensky, or the persistence of the old-fashioned model.
When Volodymyr Zelensky met with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on September 7 at the European House – Ambrosetti economic forum in Cernobbio, Italy, she was wearing a gray suit and he was wearing a dark green long-sleeved T-shirt and khaki cargo pants. The Ukrainian president is thus no exception to his military clothing choices of olive green, brown or black. Sometimes, the presidential T-shirt is adorned with a strong symbol, a military cross or the flag of his country at war.
Gone are the dark blazers, white shirts and ties for this head of state. Farewell to the typical politician’s uniform embodied to the point of cliché by French President Macron and his retinue of cloned advisers. The attire at the Ukraine summit embodies strength and patriotism, concentrating the values of the hero in action.
Clothes also make the hero.
“The military khaki is a staple of the Ukrainian president’s communication system, and I even think that ordinary people have no idea of a single word of the speeches he gives here and there, while everyone has this image of him with his green T-shirt, which serves to send a multifaceted message,” emphasizes Madeleine Goubau, probably the only specialist in the world on the role of clothing in international relations. She has just defended a doctoral thesis on the very complex and profound subject.
Clothing is used to communicate in politics because it speaks to emotions. “At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the president’s clothing choices reiterated that the situation was serious, that it was the apocalypse in the country,” says M.me Goubau, also a lecturer at the École supérieure de mode de l’ESG UQAM. A head of state who doesn’t even take the time to wear a suit and who meets other heads of state in t-shirts sends the message of the urgency and gravity of the situation. The military outfit also says that the president himself is in action, with his troops. The contrast is stark with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who only wears completely overpriced clothes.
Also read, in the same series
An exception from the post-heroic world
The style of the Ukrainian commander-in-chief quickly hit the mark and continues to do so. The fabric, the cut, the colours speak. Clothes say something that matters even and perhaps especially in politics, or in its continuation through war. With the images of bombed streets, destroyed monuments, dead people lying face down, the representation of the muscular and determined president in combat gear remains one of the strongest and most influential of the new war in Europe.
Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian and master of images and representation, has thus become the unlikely heroic figure of his nation, but also in the eyes of a good part of the world, as soon as the Russian invasion of his country began in February 2022 — it actually began in 2014 with the occupation of Crimea. The rare hero status is concentrated in the anecdote, also symbolically charged, that the Ukrainian president replied “I need ammunition, not a driver” to American diplomats who offered to evacuate him from kyiv shortly after the outbreak of hostilities thirty months ago.
This attitude contrasts with Western society, sometimes called “post-heroic” because it abhors war, fears suffering and only considers happiness in withdrawal into oneself and one’s loved ones. In the world of the “religion of retirement”, old-fashioned heroes, exemplary and founding characters, courageous, committed to life and death, like Joan of Arc, no longer seem necessary.
Jennifer Mathers, professor of political science at the British University of Aberystwyth, co-author of the international survey Heroism and Global Politicss (2022), says that the Ukrainian president continues to embody the “typical hero”, that is, a person capable of representing and evoking “the values that we admire and cherish the most”, both for his Ukrainian compatriots and abroad. The president in the khaki T-shirt makes history and embodies it. He becomes the fleshly embodiment of noble ideas and universal values. He acts as a model, inspires, guides, forges the collective and gives meaning to the struggle as well as to sacrifice.
“Zelensky constantly describes Ukrainian society as sharing the values of Europe and the West in general: democracy, liberalism, tolerance and freedom,” the professor noted in a text published in The Conversation in February 2023, on the first anniversary of the start of the war. He often refers to Ukraine’s aspirations to join Western institutions such as the European Union and NATO, and argues that authoritarian Russia poses a threat not only to Ukraine but to the free world as a whole. Zelensky’s ability to tailor his message to his audience also helps make his narrative heard.
War reveals and amplifies characters. Three months before the Russian invasion, in December 2021, Mr. Zelensky was languishing at the bottom of opinion polls because he had failed to combat corruption or stop military unrest in the Donbass region. A year later, public trust in the providential warlord, the hero in combat gear, had risen to 84%.