Indeed! For me these suits represent full body condoms, which symbolize a culture that idealizes humanities total disconnection from their environment, from nature, dirt and microbes especially. The result of a long normalized perversion of cleanliness, that denies human nature and lead to strict biological isolation and permanent quarantine of each single human body. At some point it became so internalized that now the citizens of the undercity refer to their masks as their faces and consider actual faces to look weird. The alienation of mankind from nature (and how to find a way back to it) is a main theme in the Aedena cycle and one of the reasons I always found the story so fascinating.