The man who became a crowd

Before social media even talked about “authenticity,” Walt Whitman had already embodied it. Not as a pose, but as a way of life. Poet, nurse, laborer, contradictory, radical, erotic, and spiritual. His work, Leaves of Grass , was both a scandal and an anthem. At UNODEUNO, we recognize him as a voice that continues to challenge us: because, like him, we believe that no one is just one.

“I celebrate myself and sing to myself,

And what I say now about myself, I say about you,

because every atom that belongs to me,

It belongs to you too.”

Walt Whitman was not a poet. He was a fracture. A body that opened itself to allow all bodies to enter. A song to contradiction, a hymn to the unfinished, a reminder that no one is just one. A language that refused to be private property.

He taught us that identity is not a fixed piece, but a chorus of voices, sometimes dissonant, sometimes harmonious.

If you already knew about him before reading this, lucky you. If you don't, stick with us a little longer. We'll tell you all about him.

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The origin: a poet without an academy

Walt Whitman was born in 1819 on Long Island, New York, into a family of modest means. He had no access to the prestigious universities or the cultural elites who at that time dictated what constituted "literature." By the age of eleven, he was already working to help his family, and his formal education was cut short. What was not interrupted, however, was his curiosity—that hunger for the world that would later permeate every verse.

He trained as a printer and learned the trade from the ground up, composing texts, smelling the ink, understanding that language wasn't just words in the air, but material that stained his hands. He was also a teacher, journalist, and editor for local newspapers. His voice didn't emerge from a bourgeois salon, but from the street, from contact with ordinary people: laborers, shopkeepers, workers.

Whitman never wanted to write for the few, but for the many. His poetry didn't seek to please an elite, but to open a space where everyone could find common ground. This democratizing gesture is what makes him a radical poet. And it's also what makes him a role model for UNODEUNO: creating for everyone, without losing one's own unique perspective .

Leaves of Grass : A Fracture in Literature

In 1855, Whitman decided to publish a book that would change the history of poetry: Leaves of Grass . He didn't wait for a publisher's endorsement or critical approval. He printed it himself, with twelve initial poems and a prologue written as a manifesto. It was presented in a modest edition, but the content was anything but timid.

The book was met with scandal. There was eroticism, there was sensuality of the body, there were political and spiritual references that defied all labels. And, above all, there was free verse: Whitman rejected traditional meter and rhyme to let his voice flow like a river.

Conservative critics branded it indecent and vulgar. Ralph Waldo Emerson*, on the other hand, celebrated it as the birth of a new American poetry. What some called blasphemy, others recognized as genesis. And that defines Whitman: he doesn't find his place in consensus, but in rupture.

Each reissue of Leaves of Grass (there were nine in total during his lifetime) was not just a revision, but an expansion. The book grew with him, like a living organism. His poetry wasn't a finished product; it was an open process. An echo of what we are at UNODEUNO: pieces that transcend being a final object, aiming to be the starting point for conversation.

The man behind the myth

Beyond his work, Whitman was a political force. In the midst of the American Civil War, he volunteered in hospitals to care for wounded soldiers. He spent hours reading to the sick, tending to wounds, and writing letters for those who couldn't write. There he understood that poetry was not a luxury, but a way to accompany human suffering.

Whitman also lived his desires in an era that punished him. His poems are permeated by a homoerotic sensuality that many tried to censor or interpret with euphemisms. But therein lies his courage: to name the unnamable, to embody the forbidden . To be radically honest in a world that demanded masks.

“I contain multitudes,” he wrote in one of his most famous verses. And with that, he defined not only his aesthetic, but his ethics. Contradiction is not weakness, but richness. To be human is to be both fragment and whole at once. A worker and a poet. A nurse and a lover. A believer and a skeptic.

In his daily life, Whitman was not the monumental hero he later became as a statue. He was an ordinary man, someone who strolled leisurely through New York, talked to strangers, and mingled with the crowds. A poet who refused to separate art and life .

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Whitman in UNODEUNO: Fashion as a Crowd

Why does Whitman inspire us at UNODEUNO? Because we understand fashion as he understood poetry: as a space of encounter and rupture. As a language where each garment is unique, yet simultaneously contains multiple stories.

Whitman taught us that authenticity is not purity or absolute coherence. It is mixture, contradiction, simultaneity. And our pieces are born from that: they are unique, but not solitary.

And just as Whitman stripped language of its constraints, we seek to remove the superficial mask from fashion and transform it into a message. Dress to declare, not to conceal .

Looking at Whitman's work, we understand that beauty lies in the unfinished, in the contradictory, in what defies a single definition. And that same beauty is what we pursue in every project, in every piece, in every editorial decision.

UNODEUNO is Whitman put to the test: a song to the multitude, a hymn to difference, a commitment to humanity in its most radical form.

Walt Whitman died in 1892, but his echo continues. His verses keep breathing because they speak not only of him, but of everyone. Because they contain multitudes. And because they remind us that life—like fashion, like art, like poetry—is a constantly expanding territory.

At UNODEUNO, we invoke it as a tribute and as a compass. To remember that no one is just oneself . And that clothing is, at its core, a way of being oneself.

* Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was an American philosopher, essayist, and poet, considered one of the key figures of transcendentalism , an intellectual and spiritual movement that emerged in New England in the mid-19th century.

Sources

Whitman, Walt. (c. 1860s). “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a cosmos.” Photography by Mathew Brady. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Whitman, Walt. (1887). American poet Walt Whitman. New York. Photograph by George C. Cox.