We are triggered to unravel the quintessential puzzle of well-being while upholding the fashionable persona in a dystopian environment. It feels like a reminiscent experience of a cyberpunk setting — an escape into new corporeality with redefined aesthetics, amidst an urgent need to transform the system. But, what is a fashionable persona in confinement? How to [re]define the sign, signifier, and significance of fashion and identity in this afresh reality. This unfamiliar condition proposes a “new normal”, which presupposes ambiguous meaning since it is not just opposite of “normal” or its continuum. Essentially, normal cannot be defined. It is a subjective uncharted territory, so it is hard to grasp the reframed connotation of something that has not been defined. What is [new] normal anyway. While being “imprisoned” both inwards and outwards, the experience of the in-between space of the garment and the body becomes more intense. It is a unique encounter in a world of omnipresent fear, where each identity can be reimagined in an ambiance where no one is omniscient of what will follow. The narration of a personal story in light of “disguised” vagueness, in Claude Cahun’s words is mirrored in the maxim “under this mask, another mask.”

Kristina Gligorovska