What Does a £350 Face Mask Say About Fashion During a Crisis?
- Andrew Groves
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
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.