At 74, Anatoliy Paduka hardly leaves his home in Odesa, Ukraine, except to walk his little dog around the neighborhood of blocky 1960s apartment buildings and produce vendors. As he passes by, people often follow him with their gaze. His whimsical hats and patterned neck scarves stand out against the backdrop of gray hopelessness and dull fatigue — and the familiar wail of air-raid sirens — that permeate our city in southern Ukraine.
“Sometimes I think you need two hearts to survive this, because one human heart could explode,” Mr. Paduka told me, speaking about the emotional toll wrought by four years of war.
Members of Mr. Paduka’s generation started their lives during or in the aftermath of World War II and are now living their sunset years amid the largest conflict that Europe has known since. The thought that it takes a span of only one human life to forget a catastrophe and sleepwalk into another one shakes my hope for a better future.
But then I see Mr. Paduka and many others his age who dress up in the face of this horror, showing their determination to carry on despite all the blows of history they have endured. It’s as if they are mocking our hopelessness and daring life to surprise them with anything else it can throw their way. As long as you look fancy, you are not recoiling.
In my neighborhood I sometimes come across Violetta Ageeva. She is 94 and one of the best-dressed people I have ever seen. Inside her apartment on the top floor of an old three-story building, she showed me her old armoire, whose thick wooden shelves curve under the weight of time and heaps of elegant and playful clothes.
She told me about the Romanian occupation from 1941 to 1944, when she and her mother hid in the basement of their building — just as we sometimes do these days. All her life, Ms. Ageeva has been making her own clothes, and when I asked what they meant to her, she laughed and said, “This is how I live.”
A port city that once thrived on smuggling and trade and has attracted a bustling mix of nationalities and cultures, Odesa is famous for its humor and the colorful way people speak. It has also produced its very own fashion sense — a signature mix of quirkiness and glamour. It reminds me of someone with a big ego who doesn’t take him- or herself too seriously and enjoys a good laugh.
We dress to show not only who we are but also who we want to be. We dress to impress and to attract the attention of other people and show off. But we also dress out of defiance; to look fabulous is to deny the power of any dreariness around us. We dress for a better world. Maybe that can conjure it into being or just manifest a smile out of the others around us.
And many people act on this, consciously or not. In my 15 years as an aid worker in conflict zones, I have seen women in refugee camps, where water and food were hard to find, go to enormous lengths to make themselves elaborate dresses. It was a way for them to be part of their community and to reinforce a sense of self beyond the immediate circumstances they could not control.
We direct our hopes into the future. And when we try to imagine the future of a place, we usually turn our gaze toward its youth. But the young are leaving Ukraine in staggering numbers. Over the past three years, it has lost 40 percent of its working-age population. It is the older people who have stayed behind, expressing this city’s DNA instead of letting it be fully eroded by mass emigration and war.
Ms. Ageeva has trouble walking and doesn’t go out often, especially in winter. But on the rare occasions when I see her, I feel the urge to pay more attention to what I wear. To make the dark reality of air raids, power outages and broken water lines a little better and help preserve the unique identity of the place that I love. So my heart doesn’t explode.
Alyona Synenko is a writer from Odesa, Ukraine.
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