Broken In Brief: Fashion industry unveils lines of designer flu masks

MILAN—In what is sure to be the hot new trend of the season, designers at the 2009 Vogue Medical Fashion Expo unveiled their new lines of designer flu masks and protective breathing apparati to the world’s celebrity and fashion elite.

“I just didn’t think we’d see this trend brought back so soon. It seems so 2003,” said American Vogue editor André Leon Talley, referring to the 2003 SARS outbreak. “But suddenly the WHO issues a couple of warnings, a complicit media encouraged popular paranoia, and we have our new trend. Creatively it smacks of the back end leading the front, but these are the sort of things one must sacrifice to look fabulous and free from a H1N1 subtype of the Influenza A virus.”

Among the highlights were a black N95 95% efficiency medical mask with an embossed gold Gucci logo on it, a diamond encrusted gas mask from Damien Hirst, and Louis Vuitton combo of a tan leather ASTM D 6319 standard Nitrilite exam gloves cleverly paired with a cream colored take on the famous Moldex® 2207 Alternate shape dust/mist respirator that, upon closer inspection, included a subtle pink pig pattern.

“It's the sort of detached whimsy one would expect from the world's leading designers,” observed Marissa Florentine, a fashion reporter for the New England Journal of Medical Respiratory Technology. “The sort of thing that says ‘I won’t be caught dead watching the poorer classes get caught dead in anything other than the most expensive, and therefore best, flu mask.’ Not only are they fashionable, they’re just the thing that will protect you after you fire your maid staff for being from the wrong hemisphere.”

According to fashion insiders, most designers hope to have these masks into upscale boutiques before the impending flu pandemic starts ravaging the poverty stricken population of the nations where said products are manufactured.