The way of the masks

fashion, body, grotesque

Abstract

In this article, I will focus on the role of face masks. They became necessarydue the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic and soon turned into a fashionable garment allover the world. I will frame the function of face masks within the anthropological (Lévi-Strauss), sociological and semiotic concept of the mask, and I will analyze them in relationto the image of the grotesque body (Bachtin). I will start from a definition of fashion as asystem of signs (Barthes) and from a discussion on how the signs of contemporary fashionstrongly express the body openings and the semantic inversions that are typical of thegrotesque style. The protective function of masks is to prevent the openings and the contaminationsbetween the bodies. These are the traits of the grotesque in Bakhtin’s sense.However, this function becomes semiotically contested precisely by the fashionable roleof masks. They take on colors, patterns, shapes, dimensions, which entrust to the stylisticinventiveness and the most unbridled, even personal, creativity. The fashionable masksthus become the symbol of the Coronavirus era as objects that ideally resist the separationbetween bodies imposed by social distancing. At the same time, they interpret the idea ofboth supportive and collective responsibility of the clothed bodies in an emblematic form,even beyond the pandemic.