The Media and Visual Documentation of the Medical Face Mask by the Fashion System during COVID-19: Transtextual Processes

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic generated a profound symbolic reconfiguration across multiple cultural domains, including the fashion system. This article analyses how media and visual documentation produced by fashion, through processes of transtextuality, resignified the medical mask, transforming it from a functional and antiviral object into an aesthetic, symbolic, and identity-bearing sign. Adopting a qualitative and interpretative approach, the study applies documentary and semiotic analysis, grounded in Gérard Genette’s theory of transtextuality, to a corpus of visual and textual materials produced between 2020 and 2021. The analysis is structured around three main categories – intertextuality, paratextuality, and hypertextuality – examined through representative cases drawn from fashion’s media documentation. The findings show that fashion acted simultaneously as an aesthetic mediator and an agent of cultural documentation, incorporating references from popular culture, scientific discourse, and branding strategies into the visual construction of the mask. Through mediatization and the circulation of images across media and digital platforms, the mask became consolidated as a hybrid object that articulates protection, style, and symbolic belonging. The study confirms that fashion’s media and visual documentation played a central role in the cultural resignification of the mask during the pandemic, contributing to the production of a symbolic archive that records the tensions between the functional, the aesthetic, and the social in contexts of global crisis.