Georgia Balmer
There are few accessories so in demand as the face mask. Legally, most of us have had to wear them; a mandate that is yet to exist for any other form of clothing, other than, well, clothes.
With news of disposable face masks clogging up landfills and strangling turtles, many turned to more sustainable (and fashionable) coverings than N95s and those dentist blue offerings.
Fashion brands have been understandably eager to meet this demand, and in 2021, as lockdown restrictions ease inconsistently across UK businesses, face masks are still this season’s most fashionable must-have.
The Fashion Set’s Take on the Face Mask
Some designers, such as Cristian Siriano, offered their factories and resources to produce PPE for front line workers in the earliest days of the pandemic. Other brands offered face masks that helped raise money for charity, such as the British Fashion Council’s ‘Great British Designer Face Coverings: Reusable, for People and Planet’ campaign, which included British designers Raeburn, Mulberry, Liam Hodges, Julien Macdonald, Halpern and Rixo. Not all brands were as altruistic with their offerings, however.
Some of us turned to small businesses to feed our need for coordinated and stylish face coverings, with Etsy reporting that between April 4th to April 6th 2021, people searched for face masks a total of nine times a second. Sellers increased fivefold from March to April this year, meeting the demand from people preparing to embark on an in-person social life for the first time since November 2020.
Red Carpet Mask-Envy
The trend of coordinating face masks with outfits has only been solidified by the return of ‘Celeb Land’ events, red carpets now offering more mask-spiration than shoe-envy. Last year’s Venice Film Festival and the 2020 MTV Music Video Awards offered some of the first big events to experience the fashion set’s take on the humble face mask; they didn’t disappoint. Lady Gaga alone changed into seven different, and highly ornate, face masks throughout the MTV award ceremony. Ranging from mundane sparkles to saber tooth tiger-esque horned masks, some were arguably more wearable than others, but all demonstrated the fun to be had whilst covering half of our faces. Who knew?
Our favourite celebrities were clearly as excited about the prospect of going ‘out-out’, by which we now mean any social interaction where pajamas are not acceptable, such as grabbing a coffee or going to the car wash, as we all were mid-lockdown. With so little to do, each opportunity to express ourselves became more valuable, our face masks a small nod to normality in an ironically irregular way.
The Comfort of The Face Mask
They offered the chance of expression, colour, and excitement whilst shopping in nearly empty supermarkets, queuing outside take-away only restaurants, and waiting for an unnecessarily painful stick to be probed into our noses to check that we weren’t part of the rising daily cases. As we all adjusted to life in our own homes, fashionable masks allowed us to take back some of this lost control as we entered a shockingly different outside world. The importance of that comfort and normality still holds despite restrictions lifting; masks are now a part of our uniform.
Whilst we adjust back to the ‘old ways’, face masks are still being embraced by individual businesses and public bodies as a preventive measure for the foreseeable future. We may be able to legally sweat on each other again in clubs mask-free, but there will still be times when we have to don our favourite floral mask for drinks with friends and anticipate the much appreciated compliment, ‘where did you get your mask from?’. Almost more flattering than a compliment about your actual outfit. Looks like masks are still the accessory of the season; here’s hoping they’re out of style by next summer though.
Featured image courtesy of Flavio Gasperini on Unsplash. Image licence found here. No changes were made to this image.
