Masked: Anonymity, Empowerment, and Identity in Fashion and Popular Culture

What is a mask? A disguise or a means of protection?

Laini Burton’s comprehensive examination of masking in Western culture explores the mask as an enduring tool of personal, political and social transformation.

Beginning in the Middle Ages, Burton explores how key examples such as Venetian carnival and English masquerade sit at a historical crossroads between medieval masking traditions and early modern cultural shifts. These historical precedents reveal how politics, social order, performance, and identity continue to drive masking practices today. Turning to contemporary culture, Burton evaluates the mask’s varied uses in club culture, haute couture, celebrity performances, masked protests, social media, and digital innovations including deepfakes. Through these contexts, Burton demonstrates how masks enable anonymity, reinvention, catharsis, celebration, and unity. Chapters consider how masks function as material objects and symbolic devices, challenging fundamental assumptions about authenticity, surface and depth, visibility and recognition.

Masked: Anonymity, Empowerment, and Identity in Fashion and Popular Culture urges us to reconsider how identities are constructed, maintained, and performed, identifying the mask as a paradoxical mechanism that not only obscures identity, but actively constructs, mediates, and transforms it.