Fashion sense doesn’t always go hand in hand with knowledge of the world, it has been noted about the world’s largest fashion glossy vogue† In February 2011, just before Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad opened fire on his own people, vogue a flattering and precious portrait of dictator’s wife Asma entitled ‘a rose in the desert’. So many people were angry that vogue then became reluctant to pay tribute to first women of ‘difficult countries’. In 2019, Olena Zelenska took office as Ukraine’s first lady. Her husband was democratically elected, but she only received in Ukrainian vogue a portrait. Since, well, quite a bit has happened since then, she was still in the international this month vogue†
The circumstances did not lend themselves to an ordinary interview. She answered questions by e-mail, because she is in a safehouse in a secret location. vogues bureau in Kyiv still had photos of the first lady in a suit from the 2019 session. She hasn’t worn it since February 24. “I woke up somewhere between four and five to a loud noise,” she emailed about the morning the war started. “I didn’t immediately realize it was an explosion. My husband was no longer in bed. When I got up, I saw him already dressed. ‘It has begun.’ That was all he said.’
Since then she has only spoken to him by phone. She knows nothing about many friends and family. “About a week after the war started, I was on the phone trying to find out where my relatives were and if they were still alive. And at some point I realized I didn’t know if I’d ever see them again.’
So much for what she wants to say about her personal circumstances. Before the war, this first lady did not like to display herself, in the current circumstances she finds that inappropriate. ‘If you want an interview with me, I’ll use vogue to work for more emergency aid and a no-fly zone’, she communicates between the lines.
Classmates
Many first ladies over the years have stated that they have never aspired to the role of first lady – Olena Zelenska, born in 1978 as Olena Kyyashko, seems to have become it willy-nilly. She and Volodimir Zelensky were classmates in Kryvy Rih, in southern Ukraine when it was a Soviet republic. They became a couple at Kryvy Rih University. She studied architecture, he law.
In the late 1990s, he became successful with the Ukrainian version of the comedy train, Kwartal 95, and she started writing lyrics for him. She also made lyrical contributions to the highly successful TV series Servant of the People† Her husband played a Ukrainian president who is not corrupt. Olena Zelenska was vehemently against her husband’s plan to Servant of the People into a political party and felt no joy when he was elected president in real life. In the two ‘normal’ years of his term, she did things that first ladies do more often: she campaigned for gender equality, the Ukrainian language and culture and healthy food at school.
Last summer she led a seminar in Kyiv on the theme ‘Soft power in a new reality’. As little attention as she drew then with that soft power, so much attention she draws now in a new reality of hard power, as the figurehead of the women whose men defend Ukraine. She sends tweets for fellow sufferers every day. She thinks she is at her best when she can write something down. ‘And what can we do?’, asked vogue on Apr 8. You shouldn’t think that war is normal, Zelenska replied: ‘keep thinking it’s a shame and protest’.