Given how remarkably stupid most fashion looked back before about 1850, I don't think "practical" covers it.
But maybe they weren't expressing an individual identity since they all looked stupid in the same way.
There was some interesting paper about how masks actually make most people look hotter.
Given how remarkably stupid most fashion looked back before about 1850
1850 ain't exactly the Advent of Sanity, fashion-wise. It was around that time when the advent of the crinoline allowed Western women, for the first time, to decide their answer to the question: do I want to look like a giant meringue with a tiny torso sticking out the top? And the answer was a full-throated YES.
But thinking of men's fashion, until very recently all middle and upper class men were expected to dress in layers that were (I guess) practical in an English climate even when they lived in a very different climate.
It is a true fact that until very recently, all men lived in England.
Because wool jackets and eighty degree days leave you with a sweaty mess.
3: My look is definitely improved by a mask. A burqa would be better still.
In my search for a viable spelling of "burqa," I came across this, which I'm pretty sure is objectively offensive.
I know I've read scholarship about inexpensive mirrors seriously changing young women's psyches. I think it was all about their spread through Europe and the US, though, I wonder if someone has checked it in other cultures.
1850 is nuts for both the cage crinoline and the steel-eyelet steel-boned corset. Fascinating as a runaway visual feedback, like very very pointy toed shoes and those cichlids who think glued-on plastic tails are sexy.
If you click on the link in 11, it will have an unfortunate impact on the ads you see in Facebook and elsewhere. Sorry about that.
There's a newish barista at our favorite coffee place -- I think maybe he transferred from one of the other locations, it's a small local chain -- who started in I guess early 2021 and it was hugely disconcerting to encounter him outside and realize he has a mustache.
You can buy a mask with a mustache on it.
But can you buy a mask with a mustache under it?
Just reverse the one with the mustache on it.
Dead thread, but my newborn son is still in the NICU at 6 weeks, which, unsurprising. But so he's still never seen the lower half of anybody's face. Even the existence of mouths is going to blow his mind when he gets home, let alone the mustache I've been hiding this whole time.
18: Never a chance when you're alone to take off your mask and smile at him from behind the glass?
Aw, poor little sprat. The "fourth trimester" but even more so?
18: Hope he's able to go home soon. Best wishes to you dealing with that. The NICU was stressful even for a day.
19: Some off the children had never seen a mustache.
20: He's out from under the glass now and in basically a big lidless Tupperware, so we're paranoid about getting him sick. Which, now that I write it, seems real dumb--no risk from a minute of my breath will matter. Maybe I'll start a clandestine program of chin acclimatization.
21: He's still 2 weeks shy of his due date--there was a full knot in the umbilical cord, we learned recently, and that led to heavy-duty preeclampsia, so he came out at 32 weeks with some extra sickness/smallness thrown in. He's really doing well, though, way better than we expected at many moments in the last five months since trouble first appeared on the ultrasounds, and things have gotten a lot easier since he graduated from the most intensive NICU ward. It was grim in there.
24.1: It seems like that would be fine to me, but, for god's sake, don't take my medical advice.
24.2: Great to hear that he's doing well!
25.1: We've been so scared to catch a little case of Omicron and get ourselves barred from the NICU for at least 10 days (so far so good!) that we've had trouble thinking rationally on the topic. Now that I've got Dr. peep's imprimatur, though, hot diggity!
It's Dr Peep, like Dr Pepper. Once you put the period after it, you're claiming a medical degree or a Ph.D. If you don't use the period, you're legally untouchable.
26: Full disclosure -- I'm not actually a medical doctor, but I will be discussing my medical theories on Joe Rogan's podcast next week.
I didn't realize my roommate was Black until after he moved in and took his mask off - without it, he looked like one of those groups we mentally categorize as not white enough for the Klan but closer to white than anything else. Middle Eastern maybe.