In the mid-2010s, the tourist center of Belgrade was full of various souvenirs featuring the image of Vladimir Putin. T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, pins, and magnets were sold at every souvenir stand. It was not particularly surprising, given that Serbian people have long felt a particular closeness to Russia. The Pan-Slavic idea of a brotherhood rooted in similarities in language, script, and a shared “Slavic soul” still carries emotional weight in Serbian popular imagination (Đorđević et al. 2023). It also should not be forgotten that, in and around the 2010s, Putin was not yet the image of evil he represents today. In 2008, he danced with George W. Bush in Sochi, exchanged gifts and understanding for 16 years with Angela Merkel, and remained a regular interlocutor and a “victim” of Emmanuel Macron’s “charm.” At that time, he was still seen as an authoritarian, but one the West could work with. Even though the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the war in Eastern Ukraine framed Putin as “the bad guy,” he was the kind of bad guythatthe “West” could still do business with. A decade later, despite Putin’s fall from grace in the eyes of the “West,” in Serbia, the situation did not change much. His face continues to fill souvenir shelves across Belgrade: Putin on mugs, Putin on T-shirts, and now, additionally, Putin on socks. But he is no longer alone.Putin on socks in 2025 comes in the company of Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, Muammar Gaddafi, Viktor Orbán, and many other strongmen of similar provenance.
Although these socks are sold in a country that has been historically and currently entangled with many of these political figures (Bieber and Tzifakis 2019), having itself a leader worthy of being included in this gallery (Dufalla and Metodieva 2024), they are not part of any sort of state propaganda or institutionalized narrative. They are a pop-cultural, vernacular object that emerged from below. Stumbling upon a souvenir stall where the faces of Kim Jong Un and Trump sit alongside those of Harry Potter, Lionel Messi, and Van Gogh’s auto portrait, the first impression is one of absurdity. What in the world is happening here? How did all these faces come together on a souvenir stall in Belgrade, on no less than a sock? But as philosophy and theatre have taught us (Bennett 2015), absurdity emerges not from nonsense, but from the collapse of sense itself, in that very instant when categories blur and meaning no longer holds.
The absurdity here reveals an ongoing collapse of the symbolic order, the contemporary political and social momentum in which distinctions between fiction and politics, villain and hero, history and fantasy, and most importantly, “East and West,” no longer hold (Hall 2018, Krastev and Holmes 2019). In Serbia, a country that has been navigating complex alignments, these socks can be seen as tokens of political ambivalence; they neither celebrate the politicians depicted on them nor entirely ridicule them. They become a site where contemporary contradictions are literally woven together. Stepping into them, one also steps into a world where politics is increasingly driven by affect and spectacle, rather than ideology or coherence (Mouffe 2014).
In contrast to “Western” contexts, where affiliations with NATO, the EU, or the UN impose tighter boundaries around political belonging, Serbia inhabits a more fluid, contradictory position. It resists simple categorization due to its decades-long historical association with Yugoslavia. Until the nominal end of the Cold War, Serbia was part of a socialist, non-aligned federation that positioned itself outside both NATO and the Soviet bloc, nurturing the legacy of sovereignty, self-reliance, and skepticism toward global power structures (Stubbs 2023). During the 1990s, the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia, followed by the UN embargo and international isolation, further complicated this legacy. The NATO bombing in 1999, executed without UN Security Council approval, deepened public resentment toward “Western” institutions and reinforced a sense of betrayal by the global order, and made space for many conspiracy theories about the plans in the “West” to destroy the “East” (Byford and Billig 2001). At the same time, Serbia remained formally tied to many of these same “Western” institutions, borrowing from the World Bank and IMF, belonging to the UN, maintaining the accession dialogue with the EU, and even participating in NATO military exercises. Serbia also actively nurtures political, economic, and cultural ties with Russia and China, deepening its entanglement in competing global projects and imaginaries. These overlapping allegiances do not cancel each other out; instead, they coexist simultaneously, producing a geopolitical orientation that is neither fixed nor static, but ambiguous, ambivalent, and situational.
This uneasy coexistence of resentment and dependence largely shapes how political symbols like Vladimir Putin and other strongmen emerge as popular objects. In 2010, when Putin made his first appearance around Belgrade’s tourist offer, Radio Free Europe published a short article claiming the Putin souvenirs are part of “Putin mania.” When something is proclaimed “mania,” it often suggests a kind of irrational collective obsession. But can the proliferation of memorabilia featuring Putin’s face truly be dismissed as irrational or delusional? Calling it mania makes it seem like a passing craze or emotional overreaction. Still, this label overlooks the deeper context in which it emerged. It pathologizes a behavior that is not a symptom of a psychological disorder, but rather a popular expression that challenges the dominant hegemonic order that tries to fix identities into clear categories, such as moral, good, and evil, rational and irrational, or, in this case, geopolitical.
In that sense, these socks can be seen not as simple glorification of the strongmen whose images they carry, but as products of the political and ideological confusion, often accompanied by ambivalence, irony, nostalgia, resistance, or general frustration with the world that rapidly gets complicated and devoid of language and politics to articulate the complexities. All of these conditions also frame contemporary populisms (Mazzarella 2019). The socks, therefore, represent a reified form of populism from below, a grassroots aesthetic practice that captures the contradictions, disillusionments, and ambivalences of the current geopolitical moment. In the absurd pairing of figures like Putin, Trump, Kim Jong-un, Messi, Van Gogh, and Harry Potter, these socks stage a kind of chaotic equivalence, flattening political, historical, and moral distinctions into a fashion/tourist garment. This flattening, however, does not have to be a celebration of authoritarianism, nor an explicit critique; it is something messier: an affective disorder sublimed into an everyday object as mundane as a sock.
The garment itself contributes to the absurdity of this whole story. Their physical position intensifies the sense of ambivalence, as the political message here is displaced from the more traditional messages written on T-shirts or baseball caps. The images of the strongmen are pushed down to earth, below eye-level messaging, on garments that can be easily shown or hidden, intimate, but importantly, often associated with dirt and stench. This shift leaves the meaning of the socks open to varieties of decoding (Davis 1992). Should they be taken seriously or dismissed as a joke? Are they bought and worn in admiration, irony, provocation, or simply for fun? The answer is never fully settled, and it is precisely this unresolved quality that makes them such apt carriers of contemporary populist feeling.
While not a typical space of political speech, socks as a fashion garment carry potential for subversion. They sit low on the body, close to the ground, and often partially hidden, yet they offer a recognised space for subversion within otherwise regulated outfits. In many corporate and professional environments, where suits and shirts are standardized, socks become one of the few tolerated sites of individuality. When I lived in London in 2009–2010, I noticed men in almost identical dark suits whose only visible departure from the dress code was brightly coloured or patterned socks. The rest of the outfit signalled obedience, but the socks remained as the space of individuality, a small insistence on not being fully absorbed by the uniform.
Today, socks also have a momentum and represent a symbolic battleground. For younger generations, especially Gen Z, socks have become a highly visible fashion surface, a place where logos, images, and slogans circulate as markers of taste, irony, or stance. Online, there is an entire “sock war” between millennials and Gen Z: while millennials are presupposed to favour short, invisible socks, Gen Z insists on longer, visible socks that are meant to be seen. The fashion industry has followed this shift, building whole lines and trends around socks as statement pieces rather than neutral accessories.
Strongman socks in Belgrade tap into the longer history of socks as a space for expression of individuality and the current Gen Z-driven fashion moment. They occupy a small but symbolically dense zone in the outfit, where political images can be worn without fully declaring themselves, and where individuality, irony, and unease can be articulated in a small but persistent way. They can be shown or kept hidden, treated as “just a joke” or as a quiet statement, depending on context. Anti-hegemonic yet non-revolutionary, the socks reflect the logic of populism that speaks not in programs, but in symbols; not in policies, but in feelings (Moffitt 2016). They do not offer a clear alternative, but use fashion as a field to symbolically challenge the existing order (Hebdige 1979). They capture the mood of collapse, the sense that something is ending, but nothing coherent is taking its place. And in doing so, they allow the publics, both local and international, to laugh, recoil, recognize, and step into the confusion together.
When I asked the souvenir vendor who buys these socks, he replied lightly: “Our people, and tourists equally.” This shared consumer interest suggests that the contradictions and political taboos these objects embody extend far beyond Serbia. The political ambivalence is global. The sense of ideological disorientation, the collapse of clear moral or geopolitical categories, is something many people feel. However, in most places, it remains unspoken, not because it does not exist, but because the vocabulary that could express it is not available. The categories invented during the Cold War, such as “East” and “West,” as well as liberal and authoritarian, good and evil, security and threat, no longer capture the complexity of the moment. The boundaries that once organized the world as Cold War binaries, moral hierarchies, and communist versus democratic geopolitical allegiances are rapidly blurring. The “West’s” presumed moral superiority is increasingly challenged, not only by the powers like China or Russia or the rise of South-Asian, African, and Latin American economies, but from within, as demands to reckon with colonial violence, historical erasures, and structural inequalities intensify. The very institutions that claim to uphold universal values, such as the UN, NATO, ICJ, ICC, and the EU, are viewed in many places as partial, self-interested, or inconsistent.
After Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, Israel launched a large-scale military attack on Gaza. As the death toll among Palestinian civilians rose and humanitarian organizations raised alarm over war crimes and genocide, many “Western” governments remained silent or offered unwavering support to Israel. Many observers noted the double standards of “Western” powers. The double standard casts doubt not only on the “West’s” credibility but on the very idea of universal human rights, suggesting that some lives are more grievable than others, and some civilian casualties more politically useful. The vocabulary of international law, human rights, and humanitarian intervention, once mobilized to justify the post-1989 liberal order, now seemed hollow, selectively applied, or brutally ignored. The invasion of Ukraine and then the attack on Gaza reactivated language, fears, and geopolitical imaginaries of the Cold War. Still, this time, the clarity of the ideological divide had eroded. In 2025, the global stage appears more complex than ever, caught between nostalgia for a past structure and the inability to define or navigate the present one. Liberalism no longer feels like a neutral, impassive pillar, but like one political option among many, often failing to account for people’s lived experiences of inequality, disillusionment, or humiliation.
Serbia, however, and Belgrade in particular, offers a space where that confusion is not only visible, but lived and openly consumed. The state itself occupies an in-between position, not fully aligned with any of the powers, and this liminal stance seems to enable a kind of open market for ambiguity. In Belgrade, the things that cannot be articulated elsewhere, such as the political contradictions, the uncomfortable affinities, and the guilty fascinations, are not silenced and repressed, but sold at eye level for a few euros on socks. To wear Victor Orban, Saddam Hussein, or Kim Jong-un on one’s feet is not necessarily to endorse them. It is to participate in a new kind of meaning-making, one that is bodily, ironic, and resistant to simple interpretation. These objects blur the line between joke and statement, between mockery and nostalgia. They reflect a world where people no longer trust the categories handed down from above, where “East” and “West,” “good” and “bad,” “rational” and “irrational,” no longer hold explanatory power.
And for that that cannot be named, the socks speak instead.They articulate confusion not through clear-cut discourse, but through juxtaposition. On one stall, Trump, Orban, Kim Jong-un, and Messi coexist without hierarchy, commentary, or context. The socks do not explain; they stage. They do not tell people what to think, but rather reflect what people already feel, joke about, or cannot yet fully articulate. Not sure how to feel about the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize? Have a pair of Maduro socks!
By placing dictators and pop icons side by side, by turning power into fashion, and by refusing to explain themselves, these socks expose the very contradictions that liberal democracies try to hide: that moral clarity is unstable, that ideology is marketable, and that political feeling is messy, unresolved, and often absurd. They testify to the change in the rules of the game once invented and refereed by the winners of World War II. They, however, do not proclaim new political loyalties, but instead give form to a spectacularized disorientation in which current politics is driven less by ideology than by affect, aesthetics, and irony. Like memes or graffiti, they operate through juxtaposition and absurdity, recalling the logic of what Laclau (1996) named the empty signifier, a symbol whose power lies in its ambiguity, able to unify diverse and even contradictory demands by standing in for a broader sense of discontent, without anchoring itself to a single fixed meaning.
A version of this text was originally published on the MEMPOP project blog.
Astrea Nikolovska is an associated researcher on the ERC project “Memory and Populism from Below” (MEMPOP), hosted by the Institute of Ethnology at the Czech Academy of Sciences. Her research interests are devoted to the visible and invisible legacies of the Cold War, questions of sovereignty, counter-liberalism, the aesthetics of commemoration, and popular forms of politics. She holds a PhD from the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University, and has an interdisciplinary background in theatre and cultural studies.
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Cite as: Nikolovska, Astrea 2025. “Geopolitics Socks” Focaalblog November 17. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/11/17/astrea-nikolovska-geopolitics-socks/