on eastern-european art, aesthetics and fashion

by Sergey Kantsedal

I was in Paris when, scrolling through Instagram, I came across a story about youth subculture in Ukraine. Published by Vice in April of this year, the article followed a group of goth teenagers as they navigated the routines of daily life against the backdrop of a constant threat of war. Yet it was the images that struck me the most: overexposed flash photography contrasted with the models’ pale skin. One of them showed a young girl standing with her back to supermarket shelves full of snacks. Almost like a staged photo, I thought.

The reportage of Belgian photographer Nicolas Dykmans (who has been accused by members of the local art community of inappropriate sexual behaviour toward some of the young models) is characterised by a recognisable “Vice aesthetic”. The one which transforms its subjects into atmosphere, texture, and symbols of decay. It is a visual language familiar to many of us in Eastern Europe, which often oscillates between documentary curiosity and fascination with marginality. At its best, such an approach claims to reveal what is otherwise unseen to the wide international public; at its worst, it turns difficult social conditions into a consumable aesthetic.

These photographs are part of a much broader media landscape in which, in recent years, “editorialised” images from Ukraine have widely circulated and become the subject of public debate on social media. Two years after the Russian invasion began, another feature was published in Vogue by photographer Brett Lloyd. The internationally renowned author, who has previously collaborated with major fashion brands such as Dior, Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein, Fendi, and Armani, was asked to document Ukraine in 2024.

The image that generated the greatest controversy was the one featuring Ukrainian top model Karyna Maziar, who appears on the print cover alongside cadets from the Ivan Bohun Kyiv Military Lyceum, trained to become soldiers. Titled Ukraine Today, the series was intended, according to Vogue, to embody the metaphor of modern Ukraine – youthful, energetic, yet clad in military uniform. Brett Lloyd photographed not only models and soldiers but also students, actors, medics, volunteers and ordinary citizens, blending the visual language of fashion with that of documentary reportage in a country where war has become part of everyday life. As one might expect, reactions were polarised. More interesting, however, was how those reactions varied depending on whether they came from within or outside Ukraine.

Read from relatively “safe” geopolitical positions like Europe and the United States, these images are often reduced to the ethical problem of aestheticisation by western audiences, a move which risks flattening the complexity of the situation into moralised judgments. The intersection of war and fashion appears inherently inappropriate, insisting on the fact that the two visual registers should remain separate and reflecting the concern that such imagery risks romanticising the brutal reality of armed conflict. In short: “War is not fashion”.

Although some people in Ukraine share this concern, their criticism tends to be more nuanced. Fashion’s intersection with war is not, in itself, a big issue: after four years of living through a war they did not start, Ukrainians are understandably tired of being represented exclusively through narratives of suffering. For them, it is more about who gets to produce, frame, and inhabit these images, and to what ends.

Many Ukrainians were more concerned that the digital cover featuring Oksana Rubaniak, one of the protagonists of Brett Lloyd’s photo essay and an actual soldier, did not become the print cover. Known by her call sign, “Xena”, Oksana serves as a platoon commander in one of the brigades of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and is also a poet. Her representation is often regarded as more “authentic” precisely because she directly experiences the realities of war rather than merely symbolising them.

This is not to suggest that only those directly involved in the war have the right to speak about or represent it. Rather, it once again points to how responses to these images shift according to one’s position and proximity to the conflict. From this point of view, the imposition of interpretative frameworks, particularly from Western perspectives, can easily be perceived as patronising. What is at stake here is a broader tension between Western regimes of interpretation and Eastern European lived realities, where the former often assumes the authority to define meaning for experiences it does not inhabit.

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Having grown up in Ukraine and moved to Italy in 2015, I have long experience navigating troubled, often subordinate, relationships between East and West. As I often like to cite Slovenian critic and curator Igor Zabel (1958–2005): “Despite our proximity, for ‘Europe’, still the centre of cultural and political hegemony, people from the East remain the ‘Other’.” That difference stays with you for ever, internalised as a feeling of discomfort, or even a deeper sense of inadequacy.

It is precisely through these personal circumstances of cultural transition that I became interested in the ways Eastern Europe has been imagined, aestheticised, and consumed within Western cultural narratives. These questions are central to Agata Pyzik’s book Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (2014). Its title takes inspiration from a slogan originally coined by former Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit to rebrand the post-Wall city as a raw, seductive playground defined by cheap labour and expanding infrastructure. But there is more: According to Pyzik, the expression also stands as a symbol of how, from a pro-Western perspective, the fate of the East after 1989 was packaged and sold. In this sense, “Poor but Sexy” functions both as a critique and a form of empowerment.

Pyzik’s work appears in the same cultural moment as Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009). Both books were published by the London-based publisher Zero Books, and, as Pyzik told me, the two knew each other personally and were part of the same intellectual circle while she was based there. Both of them also belong to a post-2008 climate marked by uncertainty and a loss of political and economic optimism in the West. Fisher describes a situation in which alternatives to capitalism feel increasingly difficult to imagine; Pyzik turns to post-socialist Eastern Europe to examine how cultural difference is rebranded and absorbed into global circulation.

Within the same atmosphere of the 2010s, the term “New East” emerged and circulated widely through UK-based magazines to frame visual and cultural output from Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia as newly relevant. It brought together disparate references: brutalist architecture (Taschen coffee-table books), youth subcultures (Gosha Rubchinskiy), and post-industrial club scenes in cities such as Kyiv, Tbilisi, Belgrade, and Warsaw. Through fashion features and editorial projects, “easternness” was crystallised into a stylistic category rather than a constellation of distinct places and histories.

Despite some personal links (Pyzik’s ex-boyfriend, Owen Hatherley, has been a regular contributor to The Calvert Journal, one of the magazines the term first appeared in), the two take different approaches. “New East” looks like a labelling construct reducing a complex and diverse region to a single, marketable image. Pyzik’s writing, by contrast, challenges the simplified view of the “East” as aesthetically “raw” for Western consumption and shows how the East interprets images of the West through projection, nostalgia, and fetishisation.

More than a decade later, “New East” reads as far more political. After the full-scale invasion – understood in the context of Russia’s long and violent colonial history toward Ukraine as well as all the other nations of the former USSR – grouping all post-Soviet countries under the same tag risks collapsing the distinction between Russian imperial power and Ukrainian sovereignty, which operates and survives under extreme pressure. This is especially hard to ignore, considering that some people behind this media, including platforms such as The Calvert Journal, had direct or indirect links to Russian oligarch networks. From this perspective, the “New East” no longer appears as a neutral cultural category, but rather as a form of propaganda.

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Believe me or not, but before the full-scale invasion, Kyiv pulsed with youthful energy at every corner. That vitality had become central to the city’s image and, to a large extent, to the identity of the country itself before the war. “Kyiv, new Berlin”, they would often say. Not necessarily buying into these slogans, the rise of youth culture reflected the desire of a new generation to define itself on its own terms, outside inherited Soviet imaginaries. Since the Maydan Revolution in 2014, freedom of expression has become inseparable from the attempt to claim a future. An attempt that was brutally interrupted by war.

Within this context, Julie Poly’s artistic practice speaks to how youth imagery from the region is constructed, staged and circulated. At first glance, her work may appear visually close to other representations of Ukrainian youth reproduced in Western media outlets such as Vice. However, the difference lies less in style than in position: Poly is not an external observer but an insider. Her long-term photo project Ukrzaliznytsia (2017-2020) grew out of the time she spent working as a conductor, observing the social dynamics aboard Ukraine’s night trains, with their long-distance routes and sleeping compartments. Unlike more external visual frameworks, approaching Ukraine through a curated lens of beautification, Poly’s images are grounded in direct experience. Having grown up in post-industrial eastern Ukraine, characterised by a vernacular culture of leopard prints, artificial flowers, long nails, and linoleum floors, her visual language does not reject the exotic; rather, it produces a form of exoticism rooted in everyday life.

Initiated in 2017, Ukrzaliznytsia also anticipates the moment this kind of imagery became “trendy,” developing outside the later expansion of war-related visual representation. What initially appears as a study of mundane infrastructure acquired additional meaning after 2022, when the railway became one of the country’s key infrastructures of evacuation, as well as a central symbol of resilience.

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In troubled places, clubbing can become a fierce escape from everyday routine. It can very well turn into a political gesture. A survival strategy no doubt. Despite its commodification within the cultural mainstream, it still offers a space for shared affect, remaining one of the most immediate forms of social and political empowerment. Since the war in Donbas began in 2014 – or perhaps precisely because of it – Kyiv’s club scene has flourished, transforming the city into one of the region’s most vital centres of nightlife.

After the full-scale invasion, many clubs took on new roles. The same happened to Closer, which functioned before as one of Kyiv’s key cultural venues, hosting parties, exhibitions, and experimental music events. During the first months of the war, it was transformed into a volunteer hub where food and medical supplies were collected and distributed, and Molotov cocktails assembled in preparation for the possible advance of Russian forces into the city. Overnight, an infrastructure of nightlife became part of an infrastructure of resistance.

Dedicated to the Youth of the World by Ukrainian artists Roman Himey and Yarema Malashchuk engages precisely with this tension. The video refers to CXEMA, one of the most recognised party events and key node within the scene. Set in the Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kyiv, the space is transformed into a dance floor: a synchronised crowd, spot-lit and immersed in sound by Stanislav Tolkachev. We are in 2017.

In their more recent projects, the duo, who have built an important international career as artists and filmmakers, have turned their attention to how to speak about “normality” during wartime. Among these are video installations featuring Ukrainian children who had been forcibly taken into Russian territory and later returned to Ukraine, shown sleeping in their homes (You Shouldn’t Have to See This, 2024), as well as the video Open World (2025), where a teen gamer who has left Ukraine for Poland remotely controls a robotic dog to navigate his hometown.

As the two note in their interview with Artforum: “Artists traditionally try to escape a boring life and create something extraordinary. But for us, it’s the opposite. Boring life becomes the dream”.

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We are living through dark times – not only in Ukraine, but also in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. Peace, in this context, is a privilege. This war is not about territory, despite how it is often framed in parts of Western media. It is a colonial war – one aiming to erase the country itself. So what is often missed from a distance is this: for most of Ukrainians, it is not a choice, but a necessity.

It is precisely at this point that the tension around representation becomes important: how Ukraine is constructed elsewhere as a space of courage, while lived reality remains marked by exhaustion. This opens up a number of fundamental questions: whether war can be represented through aesthetic or trend-driven imagery, and under what conditions it becomes legible. The critique condensed in the phrase “War is not fashion”, in this sense, mostly articulated from outside Ukraine, reflects a discomfort with the aestheticisation of conflict. In the case of Brett Lloyd’s Vogue Ukraine series, this is directed less at individual images than at the proximity they stage between military aesthetic, youth, and editorial styling.

At the same time, other forms of image-making emerge from local experiences. In Poly’s case, it resists standardized modes of visibility. In Agata Pyzik’s writings, Ukrainian and Eastern European aesthetics are understood as a plurality of distinct cultural formations rather than a single style, challenging homogenising Western readings of the region (and of the conflict it experiences). In this sense, “fashion” (and everything that might be placed under this umbrella) does not necessarily operate as something imposed, but as a set of already internalised visual codes, embedded within the lived circumstances.

“Ukraine” and the broader “East”, now increasingly entangled in perception after four years of war, can no longer be reduced to the categories of “cool” or “underground” that once circulated under the logic of the “New East.” It has inevitably become something else: a spectacle of resilience, destruction, and survival. A space where life is continuously negotiated not only through politics, but through images themselves.

Cover photo: Julie Poly, Ukrzaliznytsia, 2017-2019