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There was a major rebrand on display yesterday—and I’m not talking about MSNBC’s baffling rebirth as “MS NOW.” In news coverage ahead of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s meeting with his US counterpart, Donald Trump, at the White House, one subplot revolved around what Zelensky would wear; the last time that he was in town, in February, he dressed from his wartime wardrobe (on this occasion, a black buttoned top with Ukraine’s distinctive trident on the breast), and Brian Glenn, a correspondent for the right-wing streamer Real America’s Voice (and boyfriend of Marjorie Taylor Greene), put it to him that he was disrespecting the US presidency by refusing to wear a suit—part of a broader public thrashing that Zelensky would receive, mostly at the hands of Trump and his vice president, JD Vance. Ahead of yesterday’s meeting, US officials reportedly asked their Ukrainian counterparts whether, this time, Zelensky might suit up, and were told that he would—sort of, anyway. “It is going to be ‘suit-style’ but not a full suit,” a source told Axios. “It would be great if he wore a tie,” a Trump adviser told the same outlet, “but we don’t expect him to.”

Sure enough, Zelensky turned up in dressier clothes—a more formal black shirt under a black jacket-cum-chore-coat—and major news organizations assessed what they signified (some of them twice). Vanessa Friedman, the chief fashion critic at the New York Times, pointed out that this wasn’t the first time that Zelensky had worn such an outfit—the jacket, or something like it, came out at the pope’s funeral earlier this year, then again at a NATO summit—forming part of “a larger capsule collection commissioned by Mr. Zelensky’s team” that aimed “to combine some of the semiology of the battlefield,” such as patch pockets and a high neckline, “with that of the suit.” (Friedman also noted that whether Zelensky’s new outfit style “was actually a suit or rather a suit-like jacket-and-slacks combination caused some debate in the betting market.”) The Wall Street Journal reported that what Zelensky wore yesterday was “subtly different” from his papal and NATO combinations, with “added vents to the back and sleeves” aimed, per a representative of the designer, at “gradually shifting the President’s image towards a more civilian style, while still preserving the military reference.” Glenn, for one, was impressed, telling Zelensky, in the Oval Office, that he looked “fabulous.” “That’s the one that attacked you last time,” Trump said, of Glenn, turning toward Zelensky. “See—now he’s a nice guy.” Zelensky laughed, with just a hint of menace. “You are in the same suit,” he said, pointing at Glenn. “I changed. You are not.”

This might all seem completely trivial given that Ukrainian lives—not to mention the broader fate of the free world—are at stake. In yesterday’s newsletter, I wrote—with reference to Trump’s summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin on Friday, as well as other recent Trump stories—that it’s becoming increasingly hard for the press to disentangle optics from substance, given Trump’s propensity to prioritize the former, but that the latter clearly matters most, and that the optics aren’t always a reliable shortcut to understanding it. Yesterday’s suit discourse looked like another example of this trend. Zelensky’s more formal attire, and the friendlier vibe of his meeting with Trump, indicated a break with the tensions of February. This does, indeed, appear to be part of the story. And yet the details of a future peace remain scarce, and at least on some counts, Trump appears to have veered back toward Putin’s talking points since their summit. 

In fact, fashion coverage is often far from trivial—the ways in which powerful people choose to dress not only inform the visual backdrop against which we understand the news, but can be used to send highly political messages. This is certainly true of Zelensky, perhaps more so than of any other world leader of recent vintage; ever since Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, his clothes, and the broader image they help convey, have, at least, been central to his construction as a media character. In his case, too, however, there’s always been plenty of substance behind the aesthetics, which the latter have sometimes obscured.

In the early days of the war, I examined how Zelensky’s sartorial choices—he quickly ditched classic suits for the military-style wear, including, prominently, an olive-green T-shirt—had contributed to a reinvention of his image, alongside a highly savvy media strategy that saw him posting social media videos from the streets of Kyiv; all told, he came across as tough as nails, but also relatable, a contrast to the aloof, luxury-tailored aggressor in the Kremlin. Western media lapped it all up. “Along with the photos of bodies lying lifeless on the streets, and bombed out theaters and apartment buildings,” Zelensky’s new look would become “one of the defining images of the conflict,” Friedman predicted, accurately, in the Times—“a metaphor in cloth for the growing narrative of a Russian Goliath and Ukrainian David, of hubris and heroism, that is being played out in blood and arms.” Zelensky’s decision “to adopt what may be the single most accessible garment around—the T-shirt—is as clear a statement of solidarity with his people as any of his rhetoric.”

This image reflected a clear truth. I wrote back then, however, that there were dangers in the media depicting Zelensky as a two-dimensional action hero. For starters, doing so was unfair to Zelensky—a human being laboring under desperately trying conditions, not a miracle worker. And some of the coverage from the time veered dangerously close to hagiography of a man who, prior to Russia’s invasion, was seen in many quarters (including in his own country’s press) as a callow former entertainer—prior to his election as Ukraine’s president, in 2019, he had played one in a fictional TV show, among other gigs in show business—and had faced critical scrutiny in a number of areas, two of which were of particular importance to the media: press freedom, and his record on his key electoral promise of fighting corruption.

Since then, Zelensky’s wartime administration has provided fresh cause for concern on both of these fronts. Last January, I reported on a pair of troubling incidents involving journalists who had reported on corruption allegations, in military procurement, among other things: first, two men showed up at the home of the reporter Yuriy Nikolov, who had recently been critical of Zelensky, tried to break down the door, and branded him a “traitor” and a “provocateur”; then, a YouTube channel posted apparent evidence of drug-taking by staffers at Bihus.Info, an investigative outlet, that, Bihus alleged, appeared to have been captured during a surveillance operation mounted by Ukraine’s domestic security services. The incidents led to an outcry among Ukrainian journalists, who, since the war started, had had to strike a tricky balance between public-interest journalism and projecting unity and patriotism at a time of existential threat, but appeared increasingly to agree, as one observer put it, that “it is important not just to win the war, but also not to turn into Russia in the process.”

These incidents were not personally traceable to Zelensky—as I noted at the time, journalists suspected that at least one pro-government social media account that had targeted members of the press was linked to Zelensky’s office, though this was hard to prove; it was later alleged that an official close to Zelensky may have helped to orchestrate the Bihus surveillance, but his office denied this—and Zelensky publicly disavowed the intimidation of journalists. But since I wrote, press-freedom concerns have continued. Last April, Yevhen Shukhat, a journalist with Slidstvo.Info who was investigating a top security official at the time, reported being approached by military officers with an order to report to an enlistment office, which Slidstvo interpreted as an attempt at retaliation; the following month, Ukrainska Pravda, one of the country’s top independent news outlets, reported that the then-head of Ukrinform, a state news agency, had ordered staff not to talk to certain opposition politicians and other critics. (One Ukrinform reporter who spoke publicly about the edict himself reported receiving a draft-related notice soon afterward.) In October, Ukrainska Pravda complained that Zelensky’s office was applying “systematic pressure” on its reporters, including by “blocking officials from communicating with Ukrainska Pravda journalists” and putting “pressure on businesses to stop advertising cooperation” with the outlet. In December, the Committee to Protect Journalists wrote to Zelensky, acknowledging “the immense challenges facing your government in the midst of war” but also expressing concern about “signals pointing to an unwarranted attempt by the Ukrainian government to control the media and stifle investigative journalism.” The letter may not have made much of a difference; in February, CPJ reported that the security services had opened a criminal case for “disclosure of state secrets” after Ukrainska Pravda reported on private comments that a top official made about the need for peace talks. “Ukrainian authorities must commit to respecting the confidentiality of sources,” CPJ said.

Then, a month or so ago, security and other officials conducted dozens of searches at premises linked to a pair of official bodies involved in investigating and prosecuting corruption (reportedly citing, in some of the cases, years-old driving infractions); subsequently, Zelensky signed a law placing the agencies under the authority of Ukraine’s general prosecutor. That move triggered media criticism—the Kyiv Independent accused Zelensky of “making a choice to undermine Ukrainian democratic institutions in pursuit of expanding his personal power,” noting that the anti-corruption agencies had recently gone after a close associate of his—as well as significant street protests, the first since Russia’s invasion. In the end, Zelensky and his allies in Ukraine’s parliament backed down and restored the agencies’ independence—but, as the Washington Post noted, the episode did “unmistakable damage to Zelensky’s image as a champion of democratic reforms.” One of the protesters told the Post that she had initially seen Zelensky as lacking “enough competence for state governance,” only to gain respect for the way he handled the invasion. His move against the anti-corruption agencies, she said, had come as “a cold shower.”

Take all of this into account, and Zelensky’s military garb starts to send a different visual message—one less suggestive of solidarity with his people. But that’s only the case if you’ve been following news out of Ukraine closely, and these days, it’s not clear how many people still are; indeed, many Western news consumers likely still take for granted the media image that Zelensky crafted in the early days of the war. In some ways, clearly, this is to his benefit—though it may also attest to a growing fatigue with coverage of the war as it has, moments like the past week’s aside, slid down the international news cycle, a trend that is very much not in Zelensky’s interests. His change of attire may have struck those tuning back in yesterday as indicative of a subtle shift—a step or two, at least, away from the heroic and back into the realm of the ordinary politician—though it may equally not have registered at all. How his media image develops from here will surely depend, either way, on what happens next—more war, or peace, and if so, on what terms—and that, for now, can’t be known.

For the moment, the sartorial discourse may actually be most revealing not of Zelensky, but of Trump, and his obsession with style over substance and insistence on performative displays of dominance and respect. When it comes to media relations, Trump likes his suits with the word “law” in front of them, and has gone about limiting press freedoms without the at least somewhat exculpatory pretext of a hot domestic war to point to. Yesterday, CNN’s Brian Stelter and Liam Reilly made the case that Trump and Zelensky’s joint media availability in the Oval Office was an indication of how the White House has succeeded in reshaping the press pool that covers it to limit uncomfortable questions; Trump “was mostly served set-ups for his own talking points,” Stelter and Reilly noted, with one anonymous White House correspondent blasting the scene as “embarrassing,” especially “in front of foreign leaders.” After Glenn, of Real America’s Voice, was done complimenting Zelensky’s suit, he asked Trump whether he would agree that the bulk of the US media doesn’t seem to want a deal between Ukraine and Russia, “because they’ve been so critical of you every step of the way as you lead the charge for peace.” Glenn, after all, hadn’t changed.

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