The luxury surgical mask is the trend of the moment After Billie Eilish wore it, online searches surged

Among the fires that have ravaged Australia and the outbreak of coronavirus in Asia, more and more surgical masks keep appearing our screens and on our social media feeds. And the fashion world has taken the cut, especially Alessandro Michele who, in making the outfit worn by Billie Eilish at the last Grammy Awards, added a surgical mask decorated with the monogram of Gucci among her accessories. According to Lyst, the main search engine of the fashion scene, after the singer wore the mask on the red carpet, the accessory had a 200% increase in searches on Google and its demand went up by 42% in just 24 hours.

Strictly speaking, surgical mask should be a controversial accessory. Although in the East they are trivial everyday objects, in the West the mask has become a stereotype attributed to the Asian population and, when worn by a Westerner, it represents a soft form of cultural appropriation. Although not offensive in itself, the stereotype still remains a subtle form of racism, which mixes with the inevitable psychosis aroused by the fear of a worldwide epidemic and fuelled by misinformation, being more useful against the dust of the surgical rooms as well as protection from pollutants and viruses. Perhaps then Michele did well to turn (not without a veiled irony) into a design object a useless accessory that carries with it many incorrect associations, solving all its problematic meanings in pure aesthetics and proving itself capable once again to know how to use the hottest topics of the moment to stir discussion.