Everything comes back in fashion. Sometimes you just need to wait long enough. And so it happened that, yesterday, at a small pro-Putin demo in Rome, some of the infamous propaganda T-shirts first released 8 years ago, reappeared.
The story of these T-shirts goes back to June 2014 when Russian patriotic brand AnyaVanya by design duo Anna Trifonova (Anja) and Ivan Eršov (Vanja) launched the "Vsyo Putyom" ("It's All Going Well"; the motto was also a pun on Putin's name) collection. Comprising 15 T-shirts dedicated to Russia's President Putin, the collection depicted him as a macho leader in a variety of flattering poses.
One of the T-shirts featured Putin in a Hawaiian shirt, sipping on a colourful cocktail while vacationing in recently annexed Crimea; another had a print of Putin in the uniform of a naval officer, then there was also Putin as former colonel of the secret services, wearing dark glasses, riding a horse, hugging a puppy, posing with a leopard, playing hockey and so on. One of the T-shirts that became popular at the time was accompanied by the caption "The most polite of people" (the slogan in the first picture of this post), a definition that Russia used to describe the troops in unmarked uniforms who took control of Crimea and that Putin later openly admitted were Russian forces.
The main point of the collection was glorifying the Russian president and poking fun at Europe and the United States. In 2014, interviewed on Redaktsiia, Trifonova and Eršov stated: "All these developments speak of the strengthening of our country in the world. This is ultimately thanks to Vladimir Putin; he is a strong president and we are proud of him."
Sold at Moscow's department stores GUM in June and August 2014, the T-shirts caused massive queues and went sold out in a day. The shirts also received the endorsement of stars such as Mickey Rourke and Steven Seagal. According to media reports of the time, the revenues from this collection amounted to 15.6 million rubles ($245,000).
The collection confirmed there was a clear trend: in the past you would get tourist souvenirs such as kitsch matrioskas and fridge magnets, but the T-shirts were interpreted as a modern form of patriotism, a trendy package revolving around an image of Putin with as many incarnations and costumes as a Big Jim doll - naval commander, conqueror, spy, and saviour, an action figure-like imagery that clashes with that of the static man we have become accustomed to see sitting at his ridiculously long table.
AnyaVanya debuted first in 2010 with a collection dedicated to Tzars with images of various emperors known throughout Russian history, but the collection that featured Putin was something completely different since it had an almost sacred component.
Icons play an important role in the Orthodox Christian faith, serving as manifestation of the divine world in our human one. The Russian Orthodox church is a pillar of explicit and unqualified support for Vladimir Putin and the T-shirts offered a form of veneration of the icon of Putin, somebody deemed by his supporters to be blessed with divine approval. So in these garments religion met fashion and the political icon simultaneously turned into a religious and a commercial icon. The T-shirts therefore marked the emergence of an entirely new cult of personality with a divine aura around it.
Yet there is another important aspect to note: while they looked kitsch, camp and over the top, the designs used the codes of camp as defined by Susan Sontag ("the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric - something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques"), to cement political support through visual propaganda.
Anyavanya wasn't the only brand that went down this road: other brands such as Antonina Shapovalova and PUTINVERSTEHER launched throughout the years pro-Putin collections that featured patriotic garments with a military twist about them that redefined the role of fashion brands in Russia from creative ventures into instruments of propaganda. Patriotism was usually mixed with pathos and passion in these brands' collections that usually glorified through slogans and imagery the Russian army and Putin's power.
Patriotic fashion was strengthened by the annexation of Crimea as proved by AnyaVanya's collection of T-shirts, that could be conceived as active propaganda tools, practical and functional wardrobe assets to show your allegiance and brainwash more people.
More Putin propaganda followed, at times inspired by what the West thought of the Russian President. In 2016 Russian souvenir makers turned to then US President-elect Donald Trump for memorabilia inspiration. Some entrepreneurs applied on Rospatent to register as trademarks a series of high-profile statements that Trump made about Russia and Putin (including "Putin is a strong leader. I cannot even imagine what I'd like to achieve more than having a friendly Russia," and "I'm not going to tell Putin what to do").
With the invasion of Ukraine that started in February this year, this sort of collections and memorabilia may become popular again (on AnyaVanya's Instagram page there are still some of their "iconic" T-shirts from 2014 celebrating the fetishization of Vladimir Putin).
Yet it must be noted that the success of the T-shirts mainly relied on economic motivations, and you wonder if such products will still be successful if the war continues and the sanctions imposed by Western states put the wellbeing of people at risk in Russia. Today it was Victory Day and Putin spoke in Moscow's Red Square, blaming the West of rewriting history and highlighting how the Russian army in Ukraine is supposedly there to fight "so that there is no place in the world for butchers, murderers and Nazis." But with evidence of mass graves, rape and looting carried out by the Russian army, it is clear that it is not the West that is rewriting history in this circumstance.
This is actually where fashion and politics align: just like Putin accuses others of rewriting history, pro-Putin fashion collections have so far always presented supposedly trendy products with a positive, glorious and heroic edge about them, denying that Putin is a dictator and presenting him as a hero. Fashion is usually manipulative, but in this industry a fashion house manipulates consumers to sell them a product and make money, here we have a manipulative form of fashion selling not just a product, but political consensus.
Throughout the years there were other brands that supported Putin: in 2017 Matchless London produced a super cringing leather bomber jacket and capsule collection inspired by Putin. At the time, the brand explained they considered Putin "a modern superhero" with a "strong character, brutal image, sense of humor and calmness as a world leader" and the garments were part of the "Heroes Collection", that put him on a par with Batman and James Bond.
But there were also occasional designers who mocked Putin and the pro-Putin's shirts like Johnny Talbot and Adrian Runhof did in their S/S 15 collection. The duo expressed in this collection their shock and horror at the tensions between Russia and Ukraine in 2014 and dispelled the frightening aura around Putin by taking the piss out of him with souvenir shirts showing him inviting people to visit Paris, London, Milan and New York. In that collection Putin became an excuse to criticise not only him and his allies and admirers, but also those authoritarian political forces oppressing the countries they govern with their own ideals and visions. So, let's hope that, if there is a resurgence of pro-Putin's shirts, there will also be some clever designs against him.
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