Abstract:  This article examines the media controversy surrounding Olena Zelenska’s 2022 Vogue photoshoot, including audience reactions, subsequent news coverage, and the feminist social media campaign #sitlikeagirl. It investigates how feminist discourse became mobilised within highly mediatised wartime communication. Drawing on conjunctural cross-platform analysis of social media posts, Instagram comments, and news coverage, the study reveals a significant discrepancy between dominant journalistic framings of the controversy and the discourse visible within the original comment sections. While media coverage repeatedly framed Zelenska as targeted by misogynistic criticism concerning her allegedly “unfeminine” posture, the analysed comments predominantly criticised the political and aesthetic implications of glamourising war through fashion media. The article argues that the viral feminist framing of the campaign emerged less as a direct response to observable sexism and more as a participatory and affective form of wartime digital communication shaped by platform logics, emotional alignment, and recognisable postfeminist activist aesthetics. Situating the campaign within broader debates on participatory war, misinformation, digital activism, and nation branding, the article proposes the concept of digital fem-washing of war to describe how feminist visibility and activist language become incorporated into the communicative infrastructures of contemporary hypermediated warfare.

Keywords:  digital feminism; misinformation; nation branding; participatory war; postfeminism; Russian-Ukrainian War; social media activism

Published:   12 November 2026

Issue:   Vol 15 (2027): Digital Media in Contemporary Conflicts (In Progress)