Anne Hathaway has been wearing this type of shield mask for a couple of months now, but with Covid on the upsweep, the look is more annoying than ever. A shield offers minimum protection, but those that close on the top and sides, like the one below are tolerable.

Hathaway’s mask is open on all sides. It could only conceivably work as a germ deterrent, is if bacteria flew out of her mouth and rocketed in a straight line directly into the shield. Her spit would actually have to plank from her mouth to the mask without any detours, in order to stop the spread of any germs. Why is she even wearing (well waving around) such a useless piece of plastic? Does she think that masks are such a joke that she’s decided to openly mock them? Surely, she doesn’t believe that floating, flimsy thing is protecting her or anyone with whom she comes into contact.

The mask is prettily painted and, rather than being worn like a visor, it’s looped onto her neck so that it seems to float before her. She daintily holds it aloft with manicured fingers, as she glides through the street. It’s like performance art.

Hathaway is on her way to continue filming WeCrashed, in which she plays Rebekah Neumann, the chief brand and impact officer for We Work, the company her husband founded and failed. Like Icarus, Neumann arrogantly flew too close to the sun, burned and crashed. Perhaps, Anne Hathaway practices the Stanislavski method of acting and has become her character. When she chose her mask, maybe she thought, “What would Rebekah do?” Come on, Anne, take my N95 and get real. The mask she is holding is worse than none at all, because it seems to laugh in the face of the pandemic.