Controversial Vogue Profile of Ukraine's First Lady Is a Typical Anna Wintour Story
The story struck many, including some Republican politicians, as a distasteful thing to do during war. It is exactly the kind of American Vogue story that defines Anna Wintour's tenure.
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Vogue released a profile, including a stunning photo shoot by Annie Leibovitz, of Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska. The access was a flex for Vogue: writer Rachel Donadio traveled to Kyiv to interview the first lady and her husband, President Volodymyr Zelensky. Leibovitz went there, too, to photograph them.
Make no mistake — this is a Vogue story with Vogue photos. Leibovitz’s striking images depict Zelenska (Vogue’s profile notes that “surnames are gendered in Slavic languages”) looking glamorous and beautiful despite the circumstances, though the circumstances very much figure into the images. In one, she sits with tousled hair on marble steps flanked by towers of sandbags and someone who appears to be a guard or soldier. In another, she is embraced by her husband in what looks like a conference room, and in another still, she holds his hand across a table in the presidential office compound. In the final photo, she clutches a navy coat at her chest in front of the burned, hulking carcass of an aircraft, standing between three women soldiers in military fatigues.
The images arguably lean more toward portraiture than fashion photography, partly because credits for each item Zelenska wears don’t appear with each image, the way they do in fashion stories. However, this is Anna Wintour’s Vogue, and one caption acknowledges that fashion is still at play here, reading, “In this story the first lady wears Ukrainian designers such as Bettter, Six, Hvoya, The Coat, Kachorovska, and Poustovit.”
Vogue gets extraordinary access to its subjects by publishing puff pieces with gorgeous photos. Many prominent people want to be the subject of a Vogue photo shoot; as a reward for doing so, they are generally written about in an entirely positive way. But the Zelenska photo shoot has led to backlash, notably from the right. Here’s Republican Texas Congresswoman Mayra Flores:
And here’s Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, whose Twitter bio reads, “I’m the mom who told Beto HELL NO you’re not taking our guns!”
The U.S. has sent Congressionally approved aid packages to Ukraine. In late May, Congress approved $40 billion in aid, bringing the total commitment to $54 billion. The Vogue piece is, unsurprisingly, sympathetic to Zelenska, to her husband, and to the Ukrainian people. It explains why Zelenska would be engaging in a public relations campaign that might involve her submitting to a profile in the magazine:
Now, in a crucial new phase, with Ukraine battling for international support and fresh military aid, the first lady’s role is no longer minor or ornamental. After spending the first months of the war in hiding, Zelenska, who, like her husband, is 44, has emerged into public view to become a face of her nation—a woman’s face, a mother’s face, an empathetic human face. If Zelenskyy leads a nation of civilians who overnight turned into combatants, she has visibly carried their emotional toll.
Zelenska recently traveled to the U.S. to meet with the president and first lady, and to ask for weapons. From Vogue:
There, she also addressed Congress, telling a bipartisan group of lawmakers that she was speaking as a mother and daughter, not just a first lady. She showed pictures of Ukrainian children who had been killed by Russian rockets, including a four-year-old with Down syndrome, before amping it up: “I’m asking for something I would never want to ask for: I am asking for weapons—weapons that would not be used to wage a war on somebody else’s land but to protect one’s home and the right to wake up alive in that home.”
The profile more or less casts her the way first ladies and powerful women so often are — as mothers who look out for the children, not just their own but all of them. Vogue notes:
Before the war, she’d already become an advocate for the vulnerable, especially children with special needs, and also worked to raise awareness and fight domestic violence. She brought in a renowned Ukrainian chef to overhaul public school cafeteria nutrition, introducing more fruits and vegetables to a diet largely of meat and potatoes…
Anna has edited Vogue for 34 years, and long covered politics in the magazine, determined to do so in every issue, whether readers were coming to Vogue for those kinds of stories or not. In fact, Vogue.com currently has a handy guide to some of the big political profiles the magazine has run, like Sarah Palin in February 2008, Laura Bush in January 2005, and Nancy Pelosi in March 2007. None of these women were photographed in the midst of a war in their home country, but the style of these stories mirrors the Zelenska piece; they all include beautiful, highly produced photos.
It could have been argued back then that these people’s time wasn’t worth a Vogue photo shoot, which many view the same way they do fashion — as a frivolous and insignificant, a stereotypical women’s interest. The reaction to the Vogue article smacks of this sexism, which those of you who work in fashion surely encounter regularly. People outside the industry and women’s media often don’t see fashion as worthy of serious, quality coverage, but rather a hobby for superficial, vacuous people. Smart editors and writers who are perfectly qualified to report on politics and war have long been employed by Vogue and many other women’s publications, yet their work in these beats is never taken as seriously as non-women’s, non-fashion publications.
Just look at Volodymyr Zelensky posing for the September/October cover of Wired UK UK, another Condé Nast magazine.
This story hasn’t been as polarizing as Vogue’s on Zelenska. Geoffrey Cain interviewed Zelensky, writing, “I want to understand how technology was reshaping war.” The cover image was a headshot of Zelensky in his olive green T-shirt, but it was still produced, as indicated by the cover shoot credits:
Cover: Styling by Jeanne Yang and Chloe Takayanagi. Styling assistance by Ella Harrington. Grooming by April Bautista using Oribe at Dew Beauty Agency. Prop styling by Chloe Kirk.
Zelensky, like his wife, took time out of his schedule to be made glamorous enough to appear on the cover of an elitist Condé Nast magazine. The credits for Zelenska’s Vogue shoot also include styling and beauty, which is partly the rub. How dare she submit to being made beautiful at this moment in time for a Vogue story? Some may find Vogue’s images of Zelenska elitist and too fashion-focused and therefore distasteful or problematic. But they’re also much more memorable, and therefore historic, in a way her husband’s Wired story frankly is not.
Anna edits copy, but many people told me when I was writing ANNA: The Biography that her primary concern is Vogue’s pictures. For many years, she wouldn’t photograph women who didn’t have a look she considered Vogue-worthy (remember, she had Oprah lose 20 pounds for her October 1998 cover shoot). Once she decides who to feature, she is exacting about the images she chooses to print. Gwyneth Paltrow didn’t appear on the cover of Vogue until after her third cover shoot (the others didn’t come out right and were, in Anna’s typical way, unceremoniously killed). Anna’s style as an editor has not been to publish news photography, but to carefully orchestrate photo shoots with photographers she thinks are great, like Leibovitz. If the photos don’t meet her standards, she’s likely to kill a piece, no matter how fantastic the text is. Conversely, when she loves photos, she might run the articles that go with them even when her team tells her not to — which was the case with Vogue’s infamous puff piece of Syrian First Lady Asma al-Assad.
I don’t fault Anna for approaching the Zelenska story the same way she long has. I don’t fault Zelenska for agreeing to do the shoot when it was likely a condition of Vogue giving so much space to her story, which she probably hopes will continue fostering the sympathy for Ukraine among Americans that is needed in order to get Congress to continue approving aid. The war isn’t getting the same coverage here as it did when it started back in February. The Economist recently ran a story called, “Is America growing weary of the long war in Ukraine?” that read, “[N]early six months into the fight, with the prospect of a long war to come, even Mr. Biden’s closest allies are asking whether America might soon tire of the burden.”
However, it’s interesting to consider how else this story and foreign political coverage in general might be executed today by a leading fashion editor. How would British Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful or Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief Samira Nasr approach the this story, particularly the photos? Would they cast Zelenska as a maternal figure who looks casually glamorous in front of destroyed aircraft? Will Vogue and Condé Nast, now vocal about their commitment to diversity and inclusion, devote similar editorial space to other nations enduring war? Will they commit print coverage and cover real estate the refugee crises facing Syrians, Venezuelans, or Afghans? Does giving this attention to Zelenska, but not to non-white foreign heads of state, reinforce Vogue’s — and therefore the fashion industry’s — longtime commitment to a white Eurocentric beauty ideal?
The scrutiny of this profile speaks to Vogue’s enduring power as a media brand — and how it could, theoretically, find ways to bring that kind of attention to others in crisis who badly need it.
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I think it was brave that Anna made this issue, because I was already worried about my situation here in Latvia and me as a fashion anything in between are ready to defend frontlines. We will have army trainings which are obligate for men and woman from age 18 to 27. Those republicans should be ashamed saying things which could destroy American created values like LGBTQ+ or legalization or good old weed!
I appreciate that they did this article and it’s what we need now. Putin is truly evil and he’s turned our world upside down with his greed and murdering. Who gives a damn what Republicans think? If they can’t get on board helping these people defeat Russia from taking their homeland then they are just as horrific. Bravo to Anna for sharing what we need to see.