Slap on some face cream, a little eyebrow pencil, pull on the face mask and go.

That’s our beauty routine these days, and in Italy it will take you from the supermarket line, to the pharmacy, maybe with a stop by the bank in between. Don’t stray too far from home, bring your written authorization with you and make it speedy.

OK, so since the beginning of this week, Italians can also go to bookshops and buy plants for our terraces, perhaps the Italian authorities’ way to keep us mentally sane. It’s still a pretty fascist approach to personal responsibility but then, it is the land of Mussolini. That pattern never really went away.

But that’s a whole other blog post. This one is about fashion face masks, not political messes.

I’ll admit when the memes started online about patterned masks I too was unimpressed. People joked about patterns and fabrics but I always envisioned the face mask as a surgical, sterile accessory that should only be bought from the local pharmacy. I’ve personally been wearing a silk scarf by Eton around my face, because once I stepped into the above-mentioned pharmacy to find a surgical mask, its price at nearly 9 Euros each made me run out of there screaming. Well, screaming inside, you know, we’re not trying to draw attention to ourselves these days.

Recently though a lot of fashion houses are devoting their production lines to making masks. Louis Vuitton and Gucci among others. And it’s a nice incentive, a way to support the troops in times of war. This war against a micro organism which, if you never believed small can be mighty, is proving it now. The fashion houses at the moment are making industrial, surgical masks and not branded ones and yet along with the maisons’ productions, the pieces about the fashion accessory of the moment are beginning to pop up.

From yesterday’s NY Times rocking article by Vanessa Friedman, to Vogue encouraging its audience to buy fashion masks, we are going to be seeing a lot of coverage on this necessary, in some places enforced new fashion, eh hum, “accessory.”

Christian Siriano admits to having made a pearl encrusted one, there is an Alice & Olivia mask as well as a MaskClub which sends you a new mask as you need it, at $9.99 a month. Love Hello Kitty, or the American flag? There’s a mask for that.

What is your thought about this trend? Would you buy a Gucci branded mask and who would you trust to wear on your own face, trusting their commitment to safety as well as style? Or is this the future of our fashion identity, how we show our trendiness or, in my case, minimalism?

Feel free to comment here or send me an email. Cheers! #StayHome #StaySafe and remember, #masktogether.