30 April 2009: "Looking 4 something that will protect me from Swine Flu [via American Apparel]"

This post is about fashion victimhood. Under the guise of seeking protection from the current pandemic, Carles makes explicit the kind of contagion of which so many of us have become malignant carriers: " Feel like I might actually ’start taking the swine flu’ more seriously. Just want to protect myself without compromising my fashion sense." Fashion sense, of course, is the more insidious virus with which Carles, in the persona he adopts for purposes of philosophical investigation, has already become infected. And through the very act of airing his concerns about compromising it in response to real-world exigencies, Carles -- who admits to "feeling paranoid about ‘germs’" -- attempts to disseminate the recombined virus further, theoretically making readers aware of their own fashion shortcomings and exacerbating the illness for everybody. To comment on clothes, to praise or blame such assembleges, is like blowing one's nose in one's palm and then endeavoring to shake hands with as many strangers as one can bump into.

The question Carles mockingly asks at the end of the post -- "Does n e 1 know any other signature Am Appy / Urban Outfitters / H&M styles that might help 2 protect me from catching ‘pig fever’ without ‘looking like a poor mainstreamer?" -- is an indictment of a society that reduces biohazards to trends and elevates trends over natural disasters in terms of emotional valence. The protection we seek is from appearing foolish and unsophisticated, common or "mainstream", a consequence far worse than contracting an illness.

But with the diagnosis Carles presents notes toward a hint at a cure. "It is also essential to have some sort of mask that filters out germs," he explains at the beginning, a remark whose significance becomes clear only in light of what follows. What Carles is suggesting is that the thinking person needs a cognitive filter to strip away the contaminants that emanate from the fashion industry and the poor diseased souls who have been afflicted with the disease of surface-level self-awareness. Carles dubs this filter a "mask," but he means to suggest a "masque," that elaborate and ritualized mode of performance that flattered royalty and invested the courts of 17th century Europe with a spirit of languid indulgence charmed by allegorical figments. Carles tanatalizingly implies that amid the climate of crisis in contemporary society, one can inhabit the positionalities made legible in masques, that rituals of disguise and flattery can serve as protection from the fashion disease. Mas(qu/k)ing as performance rather than disguise, or as the sublated synthesis of both. We can become our own allegory and evade the circumscribed self-presentations made available through the interplay of commercial apparel companies and the minions who exploit the hierarchies they project. Thereby we escape the quarantine imposed by fashion, and the paranoia it conspires to induce.