‘Band-Aid for a guilty conscience’1? Face coverings, fashionability and responsibility during the COVID-19 pandemic

This article evaluates the important role that fashionability played during the COVID-19 pandemic in incentivizing the public to wear face coverings when mandated to do so. The digital screen is used as a framing device to examine what was communicated to fashion consumers and how this communication occurred during lockdown. Lockdowns accelerated the primacy of screens in fashion communication. While fashion communication encompasses a variety of practices, this article focuses on the marketing and online advertising approaches used by fashion brands to position face coverings as desirable accessories during the pandemic. Screens did not merely provide representations of face coverings, but through imagery, descriptions and links, they served as conduits to imagine the ways in which wearers might experience and style this new accessory. Fashion brands further emphasized how mask production or consumption contributed to responsible (corporate) citizenship and charitable initiatives, or related to sustainability. During the pandemic, these strategies responded to the criticism that the fashion industry was taking advantage of the demand for this new accessory for profit. However, in considering the mask’s materialization from screen to embodied experience, I also apply the other use definition of screen: to obscure or hide. This article argues that the emphasis of certain sustainable features of cloth masks drew attention away from the many other ways in which masks did not conform to circular design and that local and corporate initiatives obscured rather than addressed the worsened plight of garment workers. The ease with which digital fashion communication can be updated allowed fashion brands to remove references to initiatives once wearing masks became normalized and the market was saturated. I argue that the evidence reveals an industry practising business as usual, positioning itself in the best possible light through digital communication and marketing, rather than affecting systematic change: a lost opportunity for all.