The trickiest part was finding tanneries that were open and that I could order from online and trust the product.” It worked out, he says: “I was able to find some of the most beautiful leathers I’ve ever worked with.”Īs he experimented with shapes, his masks started expanding, growing new dimensions. “That’s not the way it works in quarantine. “I’m used to going into Midtown, selecting the leathers that I want by hand, and walking home with them,” he says.
Sourcing leather during a pandemic was another new challenge. He crowded his apartment with leather-cutting knives, cutting blocks, and everything he needed to skive, sand, and shape the leather. He chose suede and leather for his masks because of the playful, spooky way those materials echoed the ones used by the original plague doctors. “I wanted to explore the 2020 version of those scary plague-doctor masks,” he says. Even before the pandemic, he’d started noticing plague doctors bubbling into the zeitgeist, popping up in YouTube videos and anime series. Initially, though, Finney’s inspiration came from some dark history. “I wanted to feel like little reminiscences of nature,” he said over the phone in late June. Going to your first socially distanced, masked party? Why not turn it into a tropical aviary? Finney’s masks are reminders of the amazing, colorful world we were part of before the pandemic narrowed our horizons. They were objects of beauty and fun, rather than of fear and suffering, which suggested that the homebound could have fun in ways that didn’t require setting off fireworks at night. His versions sprouted out into three dimensions, morphed into inhuman creatures, grew beaks. So when Finney started making masks, he tried something different. Their connotations were more of protection than expression. They hewed too close to their medical predecessors. But Finney wasn’t satisfied with the shapes they were producing. Designers big and small were getting into the mask business, responding with an endless array of maximalist prints, trying to move past the clinical simplicity of N95s and the scrub blues of surgical masks. He'd been cooped up in his studio apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, trying to imagine how he fit into this new world, trying to think up ways to survive. There was no way to meet with anyone, factories were closed, fabric mills weren’t shipping. Since 2016, he’d made a living as a made-to-measure tailor, but the made-to-measure business collapsed when the stay-at-home order went into effect. Up to that point, he'd had a tough pandemic. He saw the bright orange, green, blue, and red leather beak hanging from his face, and he was no longer himself-and, more importantly, for a moment he wasn’t in the middle of this horrific thing. When he first put on the Toucan, Thomas Finney felt transformed.
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