Celebrities at the scaled-back-but-still-happening 2020 Venice Film Festival are doing their best to adjust their red carpet looks in the coronavirus age.
Cate Blanchett, Claire Denis, Pedro Almódovar, Taylor Hill and others have all displayed some remarkable late summer ensembles, both with masks and, when at a safe distance, without. It should come as no surprise, however, that Tilda Swinton, who arrived in Venice with a Wakandan salute, addressed the challenge of battling aerosols while looking great in her own way.
Swinton, in Venice both to accept this year’s Golden Lion award for career achievement and to debut a 30-minute Almódovar short, The Human Voice, was photographed wearing a white mask and a red mask, but also with two hand-held objets d’art that make one wonder why such gorgeous accoutrements aren’t incorporated on the red carpet more regularly.
Okay, to be fair these may not be the most functional for stopping coronavirus spread (although it is believed that SARS-CoV-2 microbes expire faster on metal alloys than they do on plastic or other surfaces) but they still are striking. Creator James T. Merry has crafted two “custom creature” masks for Tilda to wear during this year’s festival.
Merry is a British-born artist who currently “works from a small cabin studio on a lake fifteen minutes outside of Reykjavík.” His mediums include embroidery, silicone, and metals. He’s been working with Björk since 2009, and has been a co-creative director of her tours, album covers, and overall Björkness. He has also done work for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Gucci, and Planned Parenthood.
On Instagram, Merry wrote that the pieces were by inspired stingray skeletons, seaweed, and orchids, and also by the city of Venice itself and its “fish sculptures on the columns of the Rialto Fish Market.”
The hope now is that Swinton will somehow make it to the New York Film Festival, if only so she can show us how Merry would incorporate the Big Apple into a luxury face mask.
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