Mask Up, Look Sharp

Culture
Photo Series
2 minute read

In this photoseries, Basement community member Sam Singer imagines a world where your favourite streetwear brand has entered the PPE market.

When the Covid-19 Pandemic first begun, the fashion world was sent into a frenzy of brands tripping over each other to quickly produce product to meet the dramatic spike in demand for face masks. Now, almost 2 years in, Basement community member and photographer Sam Singer has taken us one step further, to a near-future in which it is not only mouth-covering face masks that have succumbed to branding and fashion.

“When I made the project, it was just after the second lockdown had eased, and I’d been thinking about the idea for a while,” he says. “A stylish individual going about their day, wearing branded and rather unorthodox looking PPE. I was inspired a lot by current streetwear, hype culture and the pandemic; I basically imagined what PPE might look like in a kind of dystopian future not too far from now, where all the top brands like Nike and Adidas had profited off of us and begun selling PPE with their logo on it too. At the time of shooting these images, I was quite bored and fed up with the pandemic, and I think the feeling was mutual amongst basically everyone so I set out with the idea of making the series a comic relief of reality.”

For the masks in the shoot, which Sam made himself, he decided to get creative. “For one of the PPE designs, I took a trip to Wickes and basically found all the parts in the plumbing pipe section,” he says. “I then proceeded to put some bits together like Lego. I used some spray paints for the colours, super glued a lot of it together as well, and used quite a lot of electrical tape.”

Take a look at the series below, and follow Sam’s Instagram here.