You can expect the cocktails will be expert, the steak will be expertly cut, and the french fries cooked in duck fat when the bartender wears a bow tie.
The black bow tie, the white dress shirt, no jacket, but a black vest — it’s the uniform for upscale waiters, busboys, and staff of all types. Sometimes, both sexes dress the same, but often, the women are uniformed in black slacks and a black top.
These symbols convey very clear meanings: The servers are formal and neat, but more importantly, through the understatement, the black color, and uniformity, they hide themselves almost to the point of invisibility.
What better accessory for hiding, anonymizing, and homogenizing the servers than a mask?
Check out the photos from the 2021 Met Gala in New York, and you’ll see these class markers clearly. The elites, including actors, athletes, models, and a congresswoman, were decked in their gowns and jewels, all unmasked — either on the red carpet, where masks were explicitly not required, or in the gala, where holding a drink in hand triggered another exemption.
The waitresses, photographers, busboys, valets, and bartenders, of course, were all masked.
As we worry or wonder which parts of our coronavirus response will be permanent, here’s one you can count on: At the restaurants and galas where the elite frolic, the help will be masked.
Masks make human interaction difficult, which is part of the point here.
Masks, we’ve been told a thousand times, protect those nearby from the masked. If you’ve developed the habit of seeing others as vectors (your dear sophisticated friends, excepted, of course), then the masks make the help less threatening.
Silenced, anonymized, uniform, and neutralized — just how you want them.
Masking won’t be uniform, of course. It will be a marker of what sort of establishment it is. If your local bartender is required to mask, he’ll stop once the mandates are over. But at “society” events, the mask mandate will never end.
By 2022, one of the clearest markers of class will be whether the help are allowed to show their faces.
