This feature is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
Now that our relationship to war is mediated by social media, it begs the question: Is conflict downstream of culture, or is culture downstream of conflict?
Photographer and researcher Federico Vespignani spends much of his time thinking about how the visuals of violence shape public perception. His book Short-Term, But Long Term archives over 300 images pulled from the dating profiles of IDF soldiers in Gaza, while his ongoing investigation Nucleo tells the story of “narco-deforestation” in Honduras (that is, drug traffickers hacking clandestine routes through the forest) with satellite images and declassified documents.
When Federico showed us his collection of conflict-inspired “tactical gear” aesthetics from Ukraine, we had to speak to him about the strange and underreported issue of graphic design in modern wartime.
VICE: What distinguishes Ukraine’s tactical shops from, say, German army surplus stores?
Federico Vespignani: Tactical shops in Europe mainly sell pants and jackets. In Ukraine, they mix in civilian clothes with a lot of graphic design—the kind of clothes combatants wear when they’re off duty. A lot of Ukrainians are starting their own brands specifically for combat. One shop I went to had its own military armor, which different caliber bullets had been shot at. There are shops selling night-vision goggles, gun parts, red dot sights, and EOTech. You can’t sell military-grade weapons in most places, but many had AK-12s as trophy weapons taken from Russian soldiers. There were also a lot of grenades and anti-tank weapons around—used, obviously. There are many tactical shops near the frontlines. They’re definitely more war-oriented.
This is basically a war of ideology. You have paramilitary groups like Rusich and Wagner that have really strong visual identities, but they often start from a subculture, like extreme politics or black metal. How do you think that’s evolved over the last decade?
It’s becoming part of everyday life, and a part of Ukraine’s visual street culture. It’s become normalized to see a lot of branding campaigns with zombies and Russian zombies [a reference to memes that have portrayed Russian fighters, often those conscripted from prisons, as mindless undead]. It’s also reflected in the way the Ukrainian Army itself is organized. A lot of units and brigades run their own campaigns and they are branding themselves a lot. Once, I ended up in a Nazi-oriented tactical shop, which was for the Misanthropic Division.
That’s a fascinating example, because there is no Misanthropic Division… It’s like a meme, but it’s also something that people self-identify with.
Exactly.
What else is happening with graphic design in Ukraine?
There’s a lot of AI, which is something you really see with Azov [a notorious Ukrainian Special Forces Brigade]. They do a lot of anime-style video campaigns, and you can tell there’s a skilled graphic designer behind them. There’s also a lot of brand bootlegging, like “Donbasonia” patches reimagining the Patagonia logo. You see the Forward Observation brand a lot, too, which leans into special ops stuff like night-vision goggles, skulls, things like that.
Groups like Azov started off with very cheaply made flags. Now, everything looks professionally designed. It feels like a lot of talented artists are turning their skills to war.
Definitely. I met a lot of artists who, out of necessity, started working for single units like Kraken. They’re contracting a lot of freelance graphic designers and artists for branding. I met this one kid who was doing graphic design on a MacBook on one table, and on another table he had FPV chemicals for drones that he was in the middle of building.
When you think about the logistics of war, you think about food supply chains, fuel, munitions—nobody really thinks about the grassroots production of visual culture.
Yeah, what’s interesting about single-unit campaigns now is there’s no forced recruitment of people, but the units are branding themselves, saying, “You can do this, you can be a drone operator, you can be a graphic designer…” It doesn’t have to be about hardcore combat. There’s an awareness that you can be a part of the war effort in a different capacity.
This feature is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
The post Merch and Destroy: War-Inspired Streetwear in Ukraine appeared first on VICE.
