Vyshyvanka Day, 21 May 2020

A good Vyshyvanka Day to everyone wearing one today, wherever you are wearing it.

This is a day whose entire mechanism is public visibility, and this year there is no public. No metro carriage full of embroidery, no office half-dressed in it, no street.

What happened instead was that people put the shirt on anyway and photographed it. Some for video calls, some just for the photograph. A colleague of mine wore hers for a two-hour meeting in which nobody mentioned it.

That tells you something about who the day is actually for. It turns out not to require an audience after all.

A good day to you.