Wrack your brain. Do you remember fashion? Not runway fashion or celebrity fashion or whatever influencers are selling on Instagram. Ordinary fashion. Everyday people routinely dressing for public life. It existed for centuries, and for many of us, it was an important aspect of life. Until COVID.

Along with all the other horrors it caused, the pandemic did serious damage to fashion as ordinary Americans practiced it.

In the space of a few days in early 2020, many of us went from expressing ourselves through clothing, footwear, accessories and hairstyles to wearing baggy sweatpants, hoodies, athletic shoes, masks, and claw hair clips to shove hair away from unmade-up faces. We scooted our artfully coordinated work wardrobes to the backs of our closets when we started communicating with colleagues and groups via Zoom, sometimes donning a tidy sweater or ironed blouse and blow-drying our hair for the sake of appearances. That was all we needed; nobody attending remote video meetings was likely to see the rest of us.

We stopped shopping because we weren't going anywhere. We stopped caring about hair and makeup because nobody could tell who was behind those awful masks. We cut each others' hair instead of visiting beauty salons. We didn't go out to dinner or entertainment venues, fearful of causing our demise for a few........

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