How the frenche became the uniform of communist leaders

The frenche is a military jacket with a high collar and front pockets that British Field Marshal John French popularized during the First World War. Communist leaders adopted it after 1917 to set themselves apart from the bourgeois suit and project the image of soldiers of the revolution.

The most widely reproduced portrait of **Joseph Stalin** shows him neither in a tie nor a waistcoat. He wears a high-collared, closed tunic with flap front pockets. That garment has a name and a history that begins in the European trenches, not in the Kremlin.

## From the British trenches to the Russian Imperial Army

The garment owes its name to British Field Marshal **John French**, commander of the British Expeditionary Force during the First World War. French popularized a military jacket with a practical, comfortable and functional cut, antiestéticaturing a soft stand-up collar and large pockets. It was not dress wear: it was clothing for moving around, for mud and for the cold.

In the late 1910s, the Russian Empire adapted that design for officers of the Imperial Army and aviation personnel. The garment conveyed military authority, but with plainer, less ostentatious tailoring than the traditional ceremonial uniforms of the tsarist era. That sobriety would prove decisive years later.

## Why the Bolsheviks swapped the suit for the tunic

After the Bolshevik Revolution of **1917** and the Russian Civil War, the frenche went from being a military uniform to becoming the signature garment of the governing elite of the Communist Party. The Western three-piece suit —jacket, waistcoat and tie— was seen as the formal uniform of the bourgeoisie, capitalism and the aristocracy. Adopting the frenche allowed the leadership to set itself radically apart from Western diplomacy and from the old imperial regime.

The jacket also projected the idea that the leaders were not desk politicians but soldiers of the revolution permanently on active duty. It embodied austerity, sobriety, practicality and military discipline. **Vladimir Lenin** began wearing simple high-collared jackets in neutral colors —grey, khaki, olive green—, and Stalin consolidated the frenche as his official attire through the 1920s and 1930s, as seen in the portrait **Isaak Brodsky** painted in **1928**.

## The Mao suit and the spread of the model

As communism expanded, the idea of the military-civilian jacket worn without a tie was adapted by other countries. In China, **Sun Yat-sen** and later **Mao Zedong** popularized a national version, the Zhongshan zhuang or Mao suit. It had four pockets, representing the four virtues of the people, and a closed turn-down collar. It became the mandatory national dress during the Cultural Revolution.

In North Korea, the leaders **Kim Il-sung**, **Kim Jong-il** and **Kim Jong-un** inherited similar versions based on Soviet and Chinese styles as a mark of the regime's identity. In Cuba, **Fidel Castro** kept the olive-green military fatigues for similar ideological and aesthetic reasons: to convey the idea of a state in permanent revolutionary mobilization.

The garment thus traveled a path that runs from the tactical jacket of the First World War to the great standard of communist political iconography, associating the figure of the ruler with the simplicity of the worker and the firmness of the soldier.