'Masquerade'

The Venetian Carnival masquerade tradition — carnival, from the Latin carne vale, “farewell to flesh” — served a function that has since been forgotten: the temporary dissolution of social hierarchy. For two weeks each year, the merchant and the nobleman wore the same bauta mask. The prostitute and the aristocrat became indistinguishable. The fixed categories of Venetian society — which were absolute, inherited, and enforced — were suspended.

This was not frivolity. It was a civic technology for releasing the pressure that builds when a rigid social order never permits people to be other than what they are expected to be. The mask did not hide you. It liberated you. For two weeks, you could move through the world as who you were underneath the role. The mask was the permission structure that made honesty possible.

The masks are different now. The function is the same. There are spaces that permit you to be other than what you are known as — and in those spaces, the face underneath the face becomes briefly visible, even to yourself.

This is for the woman who knows the difference between the mask she wears for the world and the face underneath it — and is learning to wear the face.