Should face masks be beautiful?
Some say they’re frivolous, but designer masks mix fashion, function
With all due respect to medical illustrators, the singular symbol of the COVID-19 pandemic will not be the digital rendering of a red virus spore that floats in the background of newscasts like a nightmare balloon. No, the definitive visual of the pandemic is the face mask. It’s on the cover of Vogue Spain and on the faces of a papparazzi-ed Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas strolling through L.A. Like your keys, it’s the thing you don’t leave your house without. Home sewers the world over are making masks from spare cloth and evoking a wartime effort of pitching in. Many of us are wearing our masks dutifully — and complaining about foggedup glasses and pinched ears in the process. Life Science Intelligence, a medical tech analysis firm, puts mask sales at 305 per cent higher than pre-pandemic estimates.
Though they’re still hard to come by for some, each day I learn about another designer who has started making non-medical masks. Hilary MacMillan, Izzy Camilleri, Ellie Mae Studios, Horses Atelier and Mackage are just a few of the dozens of Canadian brands who are using their equipment and materials to create non-medical protective gear, with most profits going to charity.
The mask has undergone a swift image makeover — what once represented selfishness and paranoia in the face of scary times is now a marker of protection, social solidarity and trust in authority. But it’s also a new way to assert one’s good taste and status. On my community Facebook group, a local seamstress is charging $15 for one of her handmade masks, but $25 for one made from a faux-Burberry check fabric.
Early into the lockdowns, New-Yorkbased illustrator and street-style darling Jenny Walton fashioned her own mask from a blush-pink Prada dust bag. The beauty of her creation — the soft pleats of satin, the delicate ribbon ties, the bootleg intentionality of a Prada logo — was eerie to behold. Designer Christian Siriano was one of the first major luxury brands to join the maskmaking effort, but he also created couture-level face coverings tessellated with shimmery paillettes. These fantastical, esthetically pleasing pieces can either represent a soothing escapism (if you’re being kind) or needless frivolity (if you’re not). With disease swirling, do face masks have a right to become style signifiers?
My boyfriend’s family, all avid quilters, were quick to start making masks for their community. When they asked me what fabric I’d like mine to be made from — perhaps a jaunty chartreuse or tie-dye? — I was deliberately ambivalent. “Anything, beige, whatever!” I was lucky to have easy access to a mask, why get carried away with such surface-level details? To get caught up in a “plaid or polka dots?” debate would be to undermine the very purpose of the mask — a conscientious act for the greater good, I thought.
Then, something shifted. Like many cities, Toronto carefully, so carefully, started to tease plans of loosening the rules, opening doors and entering a new phase of living through a pandemic. I started to grapple with the idea of sitting in my office in a mask for eight hours at a time — my cheeks becoming sweaty and my lower lashline irritated as the scratchy cotton inched up my face with each breath.
If I had the choice to wear a mask that fits a little better, and, yes, looks a little better, I doubt I’d turn it down. After all, if you lost your luggage for just a couple of days, you’d buy the simplest, quickfix replacements until you were reunited with your things. But what if your luggage went missing for months, or a year? Wouldn’t you be compelled to upgrade your temporary belongings?
It’s worth noting that it was not this pandemic that gave rise to designer face masks. When I was in Beijing last winter, I spotted plenty by Balenciaga and Off-White in the trendy, moneyed area of Sanlitun. But with surging global demand, Off-White’s mask has skyrocketed to fashion search engine Lyst’s number one spot — a sartorial sign of the times.
While logos and beautiful patterns are part of what makes certain masks sell out faster than others, brands are also taking factors of comfort and function into account. Montreal-based outerwear brand Mackage, run by co-chief creative officers Eran Elfassy and Elisa Dahan, designed masks to feature adjustable ear loops, expandable nose and chin coverings and laser perforations for breathability in the shape of the brand’s logo (because the fabric is waterproof, this is both a decorative and very necessary feature).
“We went through about 10 iterations (of the design) before we went to market,” says Elfassy. “It took us a few weeks to get it right because we knew that we wanted a sustainable mask that would be made here in Canada out of unused fabric in our archive. From a comfort perspective, it was important that our mask was designed to release pressure from behind the ears given that we now have to wear these masks for longer periods of time.” It’s already sold out in every colour. “Fundamentally, from the get-go we didn’t want to compromise fashion for function,” says Dahan.
Reporting on fashion for the past few years has often meant writing about brands claiming to have created the perfect this or the perfect that. The perfect T-shirt, the perfect flats, the perfect shower cap (yes, really). Companies are appealing to consumers by attempting to distil something to its most essential elements while rhapsodizing about its ability to make your life better. Combine this quest for studied perfection with the unstoppable rise of individuality and you have the ideal conditions for masks to emerge as articles of desire.
While fashion brands are busy crafting beautiful masks, scientists and engineers are on a quest to make masks work better. Jiaxing Huang, a professor of material science at Northwestern University in Illinois, is currently researching a chemical add-on to masks that can destroy COVID-19. Fibre tech firms like Israel’s Agraman and Czechia’s Respilon are making masks lined with copper, which has powerful antimicrobial properties. Techy, direct-toconsumer shoe brand Atoms has also developed a mask fused with copper thread (which will break down after 30 washes).
If and when these highly considered masks become more widely available for purchase, they will almost certainly come with a higher price tag and limited quantities — thus widening the gap between the haves, the have-nots and the hypebeasts.
Growing up in post-Soviet Ukraine, I recall learning how to put on a gas mask at school — a holdover, I suppose, from the radiation fears of Chernobyl and the Cold War. The gas mask is a terrifying object: dull, army-green rubber and bulbous lenses evoking a surreal robot goldfish. But today’s face masks, unlike those GP-5s from my grade two class, are not merely props in an absurdist preparedness exercise.
Cloth masks are here to stay as objects of protection and, if you wish, personal expression. And as the dust of urgency settles, I will probably consider the look of a mask just like anything else I put on. To cite superficiality and decry the mask’s evolution into a fashionable thing would be missing the point.