Covering your face is the right thing to do. Is it a surprise that people are getting creative with it?
Photo: Courtesy of Berger & Föhr Earlier this week, fashion illustrator and designer Jenny Walton made herself a face mask out of a pale-pink Prada dust bag. Walton, who is based in New York City, has been sewing masks from home since late March — mostly simple cotton ones that she donates to Masks4Medicine. But the Prada one was slightly different. Per the instructions she printed out online, she used a cotton backing and left a hole for a filter to be inserted.
From a public-health perspective, it doesn’t matter what your face mask looks like, where you got it, or how you made it; wearing a functional one is all that matters. That said, this is the face we’re talking about — our primary mode of self-expression. It’s the tool we use to communicate on every level, in real life and online. It’s what we use to identify one another, and what computers use to identify us. And now it has to be covered. It’s natural to want to find a work-around.
“Lord, it was so cute,” said Raines, still beside herself over her new, blinged-out face mask, which she wears over a second mask for ample protection. “We’re still going to come out here and help our community, but why can’t we bring some style and flavor to it? Self-expression has been something that has helped me through my darkest hours. No matter what happens, that’s something about me that will never change.
Another New York–based designer, Raffaella Hanley of Lou Dallas, made a mask with added patchwork, bows, and lace-up trim. “It felt like something productive I could do,” she said, having recently lost her part-time job. “It was an opportunity to have some fun in a not-so-fun situation.” She started selling them on a sliding scale through Instagram, with a suggested price of $23.
Fast-forward to February, when I wore the same face mask on a flight home from Milan as the Italian city went into lockdown. By then, masks were largely a symbol of fear in Europe and America, and you could see it behind people’s eyes. For many Asians in the U.S., face masks also became associated with danger and anxiety: In February, an Asian woman wearing a mask was kicked and punched in a Manhattan subway station by a racist passerby.
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