The summer that changed style

Slippers! Tracksuits! And a whole lotta dressing-for-zoom gold… Polly Vernon analyses what lockdown’s greatest fashion hits say about us

it was while contemplating the Duchess of Cambridge’s developing face mask game – with particular reference to her choosing to clash the ditsy minimal sprig-print on her Amaia elasticated ear-looper with the bolder, more ostentatious floral of her Emilia Wickstead mididress – that I became overwhelmed by The Feeling. That faintly sickening jolt, where you can’t quite believe what’s happened, and how it’s changed us. Not only was I calmly analysing an image of our future queen, her lower face completely obscured by a piece of pretty cloth, lest she inadvertently spread a killer virus round the area of Wales she and her husband were state visiting… I was

thinking I might try something similar, the next time I popped to Sainsbury’s, where, of course, I would have to wear a face mask too.

At the same time, it was sort of… lovely.

To find myself giving in to that pre-covid urge: the one where you look at a famous woman’s style, and wonder if it might translate into your real life. A bittersweet, goosebump-enlivening ‘hello, old friend’ to an aspect of myself I’d half forgotten about; a shallow, fickle, looks-obsessed aspect I’d always really liked.

There were times, especially in the earliest, most terrifying, unknowable stages of All This, where I thought I’d never care about celebs or fashion again. The stakes were too high! The drama too real. But: apparently not. After feeling faintly, briefly guilty about this re-ignition of my apparently enduring capacity to remain shallow, regardless – I decided to run with it. Reader: I ordered Kate’s face mask.

Face mask fashion is, of course, the headline on how Covid-19, lockdown, economic uncertainty and our utterly bamboozled lifestyles have changed the way we dress. It’s the most obvious and dramatic melding of new, practical health concerns – and accessorising, and just in case its significance wasn’t obvious enough in it being plastered across the front of all our faces: it’s wearing has been enshrined in law,

and become ground zero on a new form of identity politics: those who judge people who won’t wear them, and those who sneer at, and deride, people who do.

But so much else has happened to our style as a direct consequence of 2020! If pre-crisis runways predicted we’d be spending 2020 in neon (Valentino and Victoria Beckham) and/or sunset shades (Alberta Ferretti and Givenchy) while carrying enormous bags (Bottega), perhaps a little awkwardly given that we were also meant to be wearing enormous puff sleeves (Khaite); although they’d work just fine with short suits (Max Mara, Rejina Pyo and Dior), and possibly offer a sense of safety when juxtaposed against Gucci’s sheers… Covid had other ideas. Or rather:

we did, while reconfiguring our lives around it. Say what you like about this virus – heaven knows, I have – but it’s raised our game on adapting, creating and expressing ourselves, within the limitations of our weird, wonky new world.