The AW26 fashion month saw a new trend emerge on the runways: a resurgence of masks and a return to the masquerade. Over the last few weeks, it’s been mask4mask across the fashion capitals, with up-and-comers like Oscar Ouyang and Thevxlley in London incorporating the masquerade in their collections, as well as brands like Julie Kegels, Vaquera and Matières Fécales featuring their own interpretations in their shows. Though it might just seem like a reference or stylistic embellishment, masks have a new meaning in the year 2026. With the sinister growth of surveillance culture, hiding is a luxury only few can afford. But if you’re lucky enough to get away with it, how do our behaviours shift when we’re afforded anonymity?

The masquerade ball as we know it traces back to 15th-century Venice, where Carnival transformed the city into a theatre of collective anonymity. The bauta – a stark white mask with a jutting jaw, worn with a black cape – became the great social equaliser, its blank face making noblemen and servants indistinguishable from one another. As Venetian society was rigidly stratified, the masks at Carnival were used as a way to let Venetian people exhale. Under it, you could gamble, flirt, explore (unethical) non-monogamy, cross class lines, and move through the city without consequence. The mask didn’t just conceal the face – it suspended the social order to which your identity was tethered. By the 18th century, the masquerade had spread across Europe, becoming a fixture of aristocratic entertainment, though it always retained the frisson of transgression underneath the spectacle.

Fast forward to the 20th century, and masks began appearing on the runway. They have have long been a staple of certain fashion houses: for SS93, Maison Martin Margiela used cotton muslin veils to create an eerie, translucent silhouette of the face, introducing a motif that would resurface in the brand’s world for decades to come. Similarly, Alexander McQueen’s infamous AW96 Dante show debuted the now-iconic crucifix mask, where Christ’s final moments sat in three dimensions between the eyes.

Saul Nash’s AW26 show, aptly titled Masquerade, happened this January in Milan. The designer took the concept somewhere more intimate, but still firmly rooted in his home city of London. The starting point was Notting Hill Carnival, a tradition where costume is never just decoration, but a form of becoming. From there the designer traced a line to Venice, and then back again to the city he grew up in. The result was a collection that included no traditional masks, but questioned other types of ‘mask’ we wear.

A tracksuit was printed with the silhouette of a suit, a piece of clothing that Nash designed as a means of social camouflage, dressing for a room that might not otherwise let you in. “A form of masquerade in your own life,”  the designer said in his show notes. “A medium to embody who you want to be.” Where the Venetian bauta mask collapsed class distinctions through anonymity, Nash is doing something adjacent but distinctly contemporary: using clothes to navigate the codes and hierarchies of a city like London, where disparate demographics regularly rub up against one another.

When I asked CSM grad Ouyang about his whimsical and almost mischievous masks, designed by milliner Noel Stewart, he responded in the same vein. “It’s like shielding identity – you’re trying to blend in, and blending into something that you’re hiding behind at the same time.” Elsewhere, Ouyang noted an interesting resistance when revealing the masks to his cast. “When you tell established models, their agents actually don’t want them to be behind a mask.”

“We’re always on; always curating, consuming, performing and being watched” – Seán McGirr

The face, it turns out, is currency. This season, nobody understood this better than Seán McGirr: at the McQueen show in Paris, McGirr sent masks down the runway that appeared to be porcelain recreations of the models’ own faces – a replication, instead of a concealment. Some models carried the masks in one hand, as if their own face had become an accessory to be picked up and put down. And on closer inspection, the porcelain was cracking, flaking at the edges, with the perfect veneer beginning to give way. “We’re always on; always curating, consuming, performing and being watched,” McGirr said in his show notes. “More and more, we crave something intimate, visceral and real.” Maybe the mask isn’t just hiding something, but reminding us of the performance of being seen.

While these interpretations of masks may be intriguing, most of the pieces mentioned are simply not accessible to the everyman. Parisian brand Matières Fécales winked at this, naming their AW26 collection The 1%, as they sent models down the runway with dollar bills taped across their eyes, without any eye slits, blinding them in the process. The money masks were a provocation, but also an admission: that wealth affords the upper classes the luxury of being hidden, but also the luxury of being blinded from what’s happening in the world. The mask that began as the great equaliser, the thing that made a Venetian nobleman and a servant temporarily the same, has come full circle. At Paris Fashion Week, it’s now in the hands of the very people who benefit most from being unrecognisable. The anonymity is real, but so is the price of entry.

In fashion, the mask is chic, it’s cool, it’s having a moment again. The anonymity that it provides can feel like a luxury, especially in an era when your TikTok account – or even worse, your LinkedIn – can get you recognised on the street, and tech companies spy on our every digital move. Rather than becoming a tool of the 1 per cent, as Matières Fécales suggested, perhaps masks could once again be a way of dissolving the class hierarchy, just like they were in 15th-century Venice. But remember, the mask can’t hide you completely: it just lets you choose what else to show.

Scroll through the gallery at the top of the page to see all the masks on the AW26 runways.