Their eyes meet. She thinks the woman is smiling, but she can’t quite tell. The woman’s face is covered by a mask, and so is her own. They pass each other, like they often do in the hour before curfew. She continues her walk. A latex glove lies by the roadside. The index and middle fingers are crossed, as if for luck or hiding a lie. She passes another person on the street, moving away to keep the required distance.

It makes her think of an occasion, months earlier, when she had come jogging down a mountain, sweaty, tired and slow. Two girls were coming the other way; they smiled as she approached. As they passed each other, the girl closest to her stretched out a hand for a high-five. Now, high-fiving a stranger seems unthinkable. It makes her feel a little wistful. The distance, the masks, the gloves, this strangest of times. Everyone hiding in their homes. She continues walking back to her apartment. She unlocks the door, and steps inside. Safe, perhaps, and lonely.

She takes off her shoes, and the facemask. She sheds her gym clothes in a pile on the floor and gets into her pyjamas. It’s virtually all she wears these days. She likes the simplicity and the comfort. The limited number of combinations of trousers, tops, and robes. She’s gotten used to seeing her plain face in the mirror, make-up free. Nothing to dress for.

There is a knock on the door. Unexpectedly, her neighbour. He has trouble with the shared internet, and asks for help. They’ve only greeted each other in the stairwell before, yet she invites him in. Something to alleviate the boredom. He takes off his facemask, seeing that she’s not wearing one. He clearly hasn’t shaved in weeks. He is the first person in days she’s spoken to face-to-face without a mask.

They have a drink on her balcony. She pretends they’re sitting on the terrace of a bar, like they might have in virus-free times. Instead they’re alone, inside her home. Two strangers in soft clothes and plain faces. The sun sets. The conversation stumbles, accelerates. They talk of fears, politics, childhoods, their intimacy growing in the darkness. The street is quiet. The buzz of cicadas and their own voices the only sounds cutting the air. Until they run out of things to say, and the cicadas alone save them from silence. Yet they refill their glasses, and move inside. She puts on music.

The night swirls around them, music filling the room. Or perhaps it’s them swirling, with the wine, the lockdown. Dancing, badly on her part, well on his. She has her arms wrapped around his neck. After weeks of restricted movements, working from home, sunset curfews. She’s longed for human touch.

He kisses her. Or perhaps they kiss each other. He pulls back, says, ‘I’m with someone.’ ‘No comment,’ she says. He smiles a little, and looks at her. Gets closer again. They keep dancing.

He untangles himself, decides to leave.

Days pass. She sees him in the courtyard. They greet each other, stay metres apart. Social distancing. They both pause, but don’t stop. She continues up the stairs to her apartment. Tired and slow.

Yet another day passes. She sees him outside again. This time they stop. They talk of virus numbers and the extended lockdown, then of music. She invites him in. Again they sit on her balcony, watching the light shift and sink. The conversation fills the air, occasionally stumbling. They finish a bottle of wine, swirling the last dregs in their glasses. He stands up, rests a hand on her shoulder. He steps away. She stands up too, walks him to the door. He leaves.

The weekend comes around. He knocks on her door, asks if she’s busy. She invites him in. He steps inside, eyes on the floor. He lingers in the hallway. She goes to fetch a bottle of wine and two glasses, prompts him to go out onto the balcony. She smiles slightly at his awkwardness, both pleased and puzzled by his presence. They drink, talk. She’s wearing a printed green robe. He says he likes the way it catches the colours of the trees around them.

Later on they get hungry, cook a simple meal together. Spaghetti carbonara. They are both in the kitchen, navigating the small space as if one of them might carry the virus. They finish the cooking and, with relief, carry their loaded plates back out. They sit down to eat, talking about art, ideas, and aspirations. Trying to find common ground, failing. Night falls and the cicadas come out.

She wants to reach out a limb and feel his skin but doesn’t. Instead she looks at him through the darkness, trying to meet his eyes. He holds her gaze, briefly, then looks away. He talks, she listens. They stay out on the balcony until the cicadas have gone quiet too. Eventually he says he should go home, go to bed. They stand up, she walks him to the door. He kisses her cheek, she hugs him briefly. She touches his wrist. They look at each other, a little too long. He leaves.

She goes to bed too. Wakes up, picks out a robe, puts it on, makes coffee. The dirty plates sit by the sink, reminding her of yesterday. She finishes her coffee, wants some air. She swaps her robe for a jacket, dons her facemask, leaves the building, and goes for a walk. She smiles when she passes the spot where the latex glove lies, now half-buried in the ground, its fingers still crossed as if for luck or for hiding a lie.

Alexandra Cronberg is a Nairobi based survey methodologist and occasional writer.

For her Autumn Winter 2019 ready-to-wear show, ‘Radiation,’ French designer Marine Serre sent models down a subterranean runway on the outskirts of Paris. Reminiscent of cyberpunk fictions of the 1980s, the neon-hued post-apocalyptic collection juxtaposed full body spandex suits and pollution-deterring facemasks with faux fur and colourful tartan outfits. A wacky culmination of sci-fi wear and excessive tailoring made all the more fantastic by the dark, bunker-like setting it was shown in.

‘It’s a positive message that there is something after [the apocalypse],’ Marine Serre mused in an interview before the show. ‘We should stop being such pessimists.’¹

Never mind global pandemics, refugee crises, and melting ice caps. According to Serre, when the apocalypse occurs we’ll need protection from the elements, but we won’t have to forgo luxury altogether. There will still be fashion after the nuclear dust settles.

In an era when inequality is on the rise and climate collapse seems all but inevitable, the fashion industry is rife with luxury brands, like Stella McCartney, preaching the power of ethical production. But along with the promise of sweatshop-free labour and vegan leather shoes, there’s another trend emerging. It’s an alternative type of virtue signalling that enables brands to appeal to consumers’ existential anxieties without changing their production practices. I call it doomsday marketing.

Today’s most savvy cultural producers know that we’ve begun to feel helpless in the face of climate catastrophe, rising fascism and, more recently, global pandemics, and are capitalising on that vulnerability. Along with post-apocalyptic garb and water-soaked catwalks there has been a rise in prepper-focused startups (Judy), nihilistic memes, and pop albums (Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell) that play with our collective sense of impending doom. All of these things represent a new kind of fetishisation for end days, a feeling of safety in knowing that although there is little hope for the future, we can consume things that will make us feel better when the earth begins to implode. But along with Yeezy-branded hazmat hoods and tactical vests at Louis Vuitton, come new questions of what we are dressing for, and who, if anyone, will benefit from buying into the apocalypse.

For their Spring Summer 2020 campaign, Balenciaga collaborated with artist Will Benedict to create an eerie, post-apocalyptic news reel showcasing the label’s latest clothes.² In it, AI-like news anchors in exaggerated suit jackets silently mouth the nightly news while eerily calm depictions of traffic-free streets and mysterious sinkholes flash behind them. A planetary eclipse showcases the brand’s most recent iteration of matrix-esque blackout sunglasses, while more cheerfully patterned dresses are displayed on pedestrians crossing a road. In this post-apocalyptic near-future, everyone is either dressed as a corporate overlord (in heavy suiting and earrings with credit card motifs), or as wealthy plebeian consumers mesmerised by obvious capitalist symbols, like handbags in the shape of Hello Kitty.

Balenciaga uses nostalgic silhouettes to demonstrate how we can dress for a future that may not exist, but it also plays to our current anxieties surrounding surveillance and climate change. Along with headlines that promise youth voter turnout and self-driving cars, there is an underlying feeling of cynicism — an understanding that even if we build a techno-utopia, we won’t regain our privacy. It may be too late to control the fate of the planet but we can still wear glamorous, Eighties-inspired clothes.

Of course fashion campaigns have tried to tackle societal issues in the past, with more or less successful results. In the 1990s Diesel released a series of ads that critiqued inequality, segregation, and gun violence. And in 2010, Karl Lagerfeld addressed the looming climate crisis with a Chanel ready-to-wear Autumn Winter runway show that featured a giant hand-carved iceberg sculpture and models adorned with an excess of neutrally-coloured furs.

Today’s apocalyptic-inspired brands have seemed to forgo the criticism waged on their forebears — perhaps because of their popularity in the art world³ or a rise in what meme-makers call ‘doomer culture,’ a desire to acquiesce to, or accelerate global collapse. This trend has been visible in pop star Grimes’ marketing for her latest record, Miss Anthropocene, a play on words to conceptualise humanity’s impact on the globe, and the potential benefit of our own, self-inflicted extinction.

To promote the album Grimes collaborated with artist Ryder Ripps on a series of billboards that read ‘CLIMATE CHANGE IS GOOD,’ and conceptualised WarNymph, a child-like digital avatar in her image, with her brother Mac Boucher. To accompany a recent interview in The Fader, a hairless WarNymph was portrayed by 3D artist Dylan Kowalksi in a series of Balenciaga gowns from the brand’s Spring Summer 2020 ready-to-wear collection. The dresses, a futuristic take on the house’s most notorious silhouettes, included bounce-y ballroom gowns in politician red and Facebook blue. Perfect formal wear for an evil alien overlord, at least when Grimes’ avatar was wearing them.

All this is to demonstrate the irony rife in the post-apocalyptic styles created by today’s most popular designers. The clothes may be a tongue-in-cheek critique of those who wield the most power in society, but when designers like Serre are selling gilet jaunes (made to mimic the vests worn by French protesters in 2019) for over $1000, and Balenciaga dresses are being worn by an avatar (who represents the girlfriend of billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk), dressing for the end of the world becomes an inside-joke, afforded only by the rich.

This fact becomes all the more obvious when we’re confronted by a real crisis. It’s easy to call Serre’s brightly coloured collections optimistic when facing a near-future, existential threat, but when millions are confronted with facemask shortages during a global pandemic, expensive, high fashion protective gear no longer looks cute. Today we have pop stars like Billie Eilish wearing Gucci monogram facemasks and models like Naomi Campbell posing in hazmat suits while the rest of us are left DIYing bras into protective wear.

Like ads for bulletproof backpacks and panic orange ‘go bags’ the commodification of terror is always disturbing, even when the result seems practical. Yet we cannot blame regular consumers for their desire to achieve the preparedness of the elite. Though we may not be able to afford panic rooms and off-grid bunkers, or even a two-week supply of food, a slime green gift-with-purchase mask along with Billie Eilish’s latest album may make us feel one step closer to emulating those who can. It’s the reason why people are stocking up on toilet paper during a pandemic that affects our lungs. In end-times we will buy anything to make us feel prepared for the inevitable, but only the rich will survive.

Taylore Scarabelli is a New York-based writer whose work focuses on fashion, feminism and technology. She is fond of Ed Hardy and fist-size hoops.

1. L Prigent, ‘Survive the Apocalypse With Marine Serre!’ YouTube, retrieved on 12-03-2020 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa6PazhI6_0 ↩

2. Balenciaga, ‘Balenciaga Summer 20 Campaign,’ YouTube, retrieved on 12-03-2020 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHSeIK6tmfg ↩

3. R Tashjian, ‘How Balenciaga Became the Art World’s Favorite Brand,’ GQ, retrieved on 12-03-2020 from https://www.gq.com/story/balenciaga-art-world ↩