Five years ago, the world locked down. At that moment, face coverings began to rapidly shift from being a medical necessity to a luxury statement. And fashion archives like the Westminster Menswear Archive had to respond in real time.
This Louis Vuitton Monogram Tapestry Bandana Mask Cover Set, released on 13 November 2020, retailed at £350. It came complete with a matching drawstring pouch and bandana and reimagined the face mask as a luxury object. It was also one of the many examples featured in our exhibition Undercover: From Necessity to Luxury, which documented how face coverings became charged with new meanings during the pandemic.
I’m pleased to share that our paper, drawn from the exhibition, has been accepted for publication in the upcoming Dressing Through Pandemics special issue of Fashion, Style and Popular Culture.
The paper explores how brands such as Burberry, Balenciaga, and Louis Vuitton reframed face masks as desirable, high-status items, often reinforcing existing hierarchies, even as the pandemic laid bare global inequalities. It also examines how we as curators navigated rapid collecting, digital exhibition design, and archival strategies during a live crisis.
One section of the exhibition involved minting 365 discarded face coverings as NFTs to question what value and authenticity mean in fashion archives today.
Key themes include:
- How PPE was transformed into luxury fashion
- Rapid response collecting in a menswear archive
- The role of NFTs and digital exhibition strategies
- How pandemic aesthetics reinforced gendered hierarchies
The journal issue will be published in January 2026, with articles available online before then.
I’m looking forward to presenting at the Fourth International Artefacta Conference next year, which will take place in Helsinki in February 2025.
Our paper, “Determining the Future: Pre-Creation Accessioning and the Documentation of Design Process”, aligns with the conference’s focus on artefacts and material culture. The paper explores pioneering curatorial strategies we’ve developed in collaboration with the Massimo Osti Studio, challenging conventional museum accessioning practices.
Museums tend to accession garments long after their production, once their aesthetic, societal, or critical value has been established. However, rapidly evolving design, production, and consumption practices—exemplified by the rise of direct-to-consumer models and limited edition drops—demand a more immediate approach, one that preserves the full spectrum of a garment's relationship to these processes and its connection to production and culture.
In 2022, after discussions with Lorenzo Osti, the Westminster Menswear Archive (WMA) launched a unique project to document the design evolution of the newly founded Massimo Osti Studio. Even before the first garments were conceived or designed, WMA decided to accession a sample from each production piece created during the Studio’s foundational year in 2024.
Our paper will examine the innovative curatorial strategy employed by the WMA, showcasing the determination of the creative and industrial processes of garment production while intentionally avoiding the imposition of curatorial or donor biases. By embracing the uncertainty and unpredictability of this approach, the WMA sought to document a dynamic and evolving narrative, highlighting the complexities of contemporary fashion and material culture.